INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Atrial fibrillation, or AFib, is the most common heart rhythm disorder in the world and impacts more than six million Americans right now. Not only does AFib cause your heart to beat out of whack, but it increases your risk of blood clots and stroke. Early treatment can be life-saving, but treating it the wrong way can be life-threatening. AI may help doctors get it just right.

Matthew McKillop, MD, FACC, FHRS, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida, explains, “Atrial Fibrillation’s an abnormal heart rhythm. What we don’t want are patients having fast heart rates for very long periods of time.”

And AFib can be silent, ultimately leading to a stroke, but McKillop hopes that artificial intelligence will help doctors successfully treat AFib before that can happen.

“This is one of the most interesting parts of the technology developments in my career,” said McKillop.

Currently, doctors use a catheter to go inside the heart and collect electrical signals to find out what’s causing the irregular heartbeat. McKillop was the fourth doctor in the world to use the Star Apollo Mapping System to make sense of the chaos. It uses AI-driven, high density mapping catheters to help precisely target the problem.

McKillop further explains, “Within about five minutes, we identify somewhere between 10 and 50,000 points of information. And so, that information is obviously too complicated and too dense for us to unpack ourselves.”

But AI can quickly decipher the information, allowing McKillop to use ablation to get the heart back in rhythm. There are five U.S. centers taking part in this study and they are all are currently enrolling patients that have already had one ablation, but still have AFib.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.