An important piece of the puzzle for understanding the benefits of concomitant ablation of atrial fibrillation in cardiac surgery

Surgical treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF) has come a long way since the early days of the Cox-maze III procedure (CM-3), introduced by James Cox in the late 80’s (1). Back then, there was no catheter ablation therapy available for AF and CM-3 was offered as a stand-alone treatment for drug-refractory AF in carefully selected patients.