Surgical management of atrioesophageal fistula after catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation: A French nationwide study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective The study objective was to assess the efficacity of different surgical strategies for atrioesophageal fistula after catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation. Methods Between January 2010 and April 2023, all patients with a diagnosis of atrioesophageal fistula or pericardo-esophageal fistula after catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation were analyzed retrospectively from the French database EPITHOR. Patients without surgical management were excluded. Results Eighteen patients were included, 15 with atrioesophageal fistula and 3 with pericardo-esophageal fistula. Median follow-up was 89.5 days with an overall survival of 50%. Five patients underwent esophageal stenting, 2 as a bridge-to-esophagectomy with 50% of survival and 3 in association with esophagus and left atrial direct repair with 66% survival. Primary esophageal repair with flap coverage was performed in 8 patients with 25% survival, most of them with sepsis and neurological failure. Seven patients had an esophagectomy with 71% survival, only 2 of them having a neurological failure. Among them, 5 patients underwent a restorative surgery and are still alive. Four patients had a retrosternal colon interposition, and 1 patient had an esogastric anastomosis. Risk factors for death were neurological failure (hazard ratio [HR], 4.91, 95% CI, 0.95-25.22; P = .0057) in univariate analysis and sepsis (HR, 6.25, 95% CI, 1.17-33.3; P = .032) in multivariate analysis. Esophagectomy tended to offer a survival benefit (HR, 0.163, 95% CI, 0.019-1.340; P = .092). The use of cardiopulmonary bypass did not significantly impact survival (HR, 1.953, 95% CI, 0.392-9.719; P = .413). Conclusions Aggressive surgical strategies for managing atrioesophageal fistula are mandatory to offer the best chance of survival.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".