Concepts of ventricular defibrillation

Abstract
Despite its critical role in restoring cardiac rhythm and thus, in saving human life, cardiac defibrillation remains poorly understood. For a defibrillation shock to be successful, the shock must extinguish existing activation fronts throughout the myocardium without initiating new re–entrant activations. The goal of this paper is to examine the current theories for defibrillation and re-entry induction, the new breakthroughs in the field, and the emerging new hypotheses.