{"doi":"10.3389/fphys.2022.848096","title":"Editorial: Atrial Fibrillation: Technology for Diagnosis, Monitoring, and Treatment","abstract":"Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained clinical arrhythmia. With a 2.4-fold risk increase, AF is the leading cause of embolic stroke. It also increases the risk for heart failure 5-fold and mortality 2-fold 1,2 . AF is reaching an epidemic proportion estimated to affect 0.51% of worldwide population and its prevalence is estimated at more than 37 million worldwide. The prevalence of AF increased by a 33% en the last 20 years and is expected to increase by more than 60% in 2050 3,4 . Its prevalence increases with age and is predicted to further surge in the future. Overall, AF is a major societal burden with immense financial costs associated with the care of patients, mostly on hospitalization and complications such as stroke 5 . It is estimated that the total annual incremental costs of AF care can reach $26 billion in the US 6 and AF costs across several European countries account for 0.28-2.60% of their total healthcare spending 3,7, 8 .The reasons for the high burden of AF may lay in its heterogenous, multi-factorial and progressive nature; despite intense research efforts, its initiation, sustenance and termination mechanisms are still poorly understood, and therapy remains suboptimal 9 . It is widely accepted that both AF research, healthcare delivery and outcomes can be improved by advancement of technology 5 . This Research Topic presents a collection of 37 original and review papers focusing on technological challenges and advances for improved understanding of AF and better diagnosis, monitoring and management of the arrhythmia. A total of 262 students and faculty of diverse background have contributed to the papers and highlight the important role of a multi-discipline research, particularly by next generation investigators, in advancing AF therapy. This is a provisional file, not the final typeset article When pharmacological cardioversion fails, atrial arrhythmias are typically treated with catheter ablation. In such case, characterizing the atrial electrical activity and structure in patients may constitute an important step towards a successful intervention. This step mostly relies on various methods for electrical activity and tissue characteristics mapping to identify the arrhythmogenic substrate. Salinet et al. review the use of non-invasive electrocardiographic imaging for AF characterization for ablation guidance and discuss the technological and validation requirements. Their method successfully identifies and quantifies the spatiotemporal repetition of high DF sites showing that recurring patterns offer a more comprehensive dynamic insight of persistent AF. The potential benefit of ablating such regions remains to be shown. An important element of catheter ablation intervention is a pacing protocol to test for non-inducibility of arrhythmia post-ablation. Azzolin et al. perform an in-silico investigation searching for a standardized protocol to induce arrhythmia after an intervention. They propose a novel method of pacing at the end of the effective refractory period for assessment of arrhythmia vulnerability. The openly available protocol can become a standard for in silico and clinical arrhythmia inducibility testing.Successful AF termination by ablation is thought to dependent on the detection of drivers and their interactions with the atrial activity at large. Among the different possible driver types, reentrant and rotor patterns have gained the most attention. Spector et al. show in a computational propagation model that the degree to which a focal reentrant driver and the surrounding chaotic activation interact depends on the relative characteristics of the anatomical and functional (rotor) reentrant substrates. Ganesan et al. developed a quantitative birth-death framework providing insight into the wavelet and rotor dynamics in AF and their spontaneous termination. In the clinic, rotor detection relies on signals recorded by multi-electrode catheters, which can be influenced by a nu","journal":"Frontiers in Physiology","year":2022,"id":302778,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9654,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":994945,"name":"Valentina Corino","orcid":"0000-0003-1825-0422","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":62936,"name":"Axel Loewe","orcid":"0000-0002-2487-4744","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":994946,"name":"Juan Pablo Martí­nez","orcid":"0000-0002-7503-3339","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":995233,"name":"José Félix Rodríguez Matas","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":678240,"name":"Omer Berenfeld","orcid":"0000-0001-9532-7871","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":10,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:32:20.348385Z","pmid":"35283792","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}