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European Heart Journal Advance Access originally published online on April 18, 2006
European Heart Journal 2006 27(10):1134-1136; doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehi862
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© The European Society of Cardiology 2006. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Non-fluoroscopic mapping systems for electrophysiology: the ‘tool or toy’ dilemma after 10 years

Roberto De Ponti* and Jorge A. Salerno-Uriarte

Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, Ospedale di Circolo e Fondazione Macchi, University of Insubria – Varese, Viale Borri, 57, IT-21100 Varese, Italy

* Corresponding author. Tel: +39 0332 278934; fax: +39 0332 393309. E-mail address: rdeponti@alice.it

This editorial refers to ‘Radiofrequency ablation of arrhythmias guided by non-fluoroscopic catheter location: a prospective randomized trial'{dagger} by M.J. Earley et al., on page 1223

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Searching in PubMed for the string ‘tool or toy’ in the title of medical papers, we found that over the past three decades about 50 papers brought up the dilemma concerning whether a novel technology is a useful tool, or merely an expensive toy. The papers are from 15 different medical disciplines spanning from radiology, neurology, anaesthesia, and surgery. Surprisingly, in almost half of these papers the ‘tool or toy’ dilemma is posed for new technologies introduced in the cardiovascular field. Several of them, such as stress echocardiography and transoesophageal echocardiography, have become widely diffused and have definitely become routine practice. Although this analysis of the medical literature is gross, the result underlines that this dilemma is not so rare. In fact, new technologies are periodically proposed and the reaction of the medical community is usually quite ambiguous, varying from the hardest scepticism to the warmest enthusiasm. Actually, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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Related articles in EHJ:

Radiofrequency ablation of arrhythmias guided by non-fluoroscopic catheter location: a prospective randomized trial
Mark J. Earley, Refai Showkathali, Maysaa Alzetani, Peter M. Kistler, Dhiraj Gupta, Dominic J. Abrams, Julie A. Horrocks, Stuart J. Harris, Simon C. Sporton, and Richard J. Schilling
EHJ 2006 27: 1223-1229. [Abstract] [Full Text]