Cardiac Pacemakers and Resynchronization Step by Step: An Illustrated Guide

This new edition of the bestselling step-by-step introduction to cardiac pacemakers now includes additional material on CRT and an accompanying website. It retains the effective use of full-page illustrations and short explanations that gained the book such enormous popularity and now provides information on recent advances in cardiac pacing, including biventricular pacing for the treatment of heart failure.

Preface to the first edition: The impetus for writing this book came from our observations that many healthcare professionals and young physicians working in emergency rooms, intensive and coronary care units were unable to interpret simple pacemaker electrocardiograms correctly. Over the years we also heard many complaints from beginners in the field of cardiac pacing that virtually all, if not all, the available books are too complicated and almost impossible to understand. Indeed, the ever-changing progress in electrical stimulation makes cardiac pacing a moving target. Therefore we decided to take up the challenge and write a book for beginners equipped with only a rudimentary knowledge of electrocardiography and no knowledge of cardiac pacing whatsoever. Because many individuals first see the pacemaker patient after implantation, the book contains little about indications for pacing and implantation techniques.

The book starts with basic concepts and progressively covers more advanced aspects of cardiac pacing including troubleshooting and follow-up. As one picture is worth a thousand words, this book tries to avoid unnecessary text and focuses on visual learning. We undertook this project with the premise that learning cardiac pacing should be enjoyable. Cardiac pacing is a logical discipline and should be fun and easy to learn with the carefully crafted illustrations in this book.

The artwork is simple for easy comprehension. Many of the plates are self-explanatory and the text in the appendix only intends to provide further details and a comprehensive overview. Many of the images used to create the illustrations in this book are taken from CorelDraw and Corel Mega Gallery clipart collections. We are grateful to Charlie Hamlyn and Tom Fryer for their superb work in the production of this book.