Hello and welcome to living in the Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

New cardiac technology is in place at a local hospital working to improve patient safety and recovery times.

St Luke's University Health Network was recently one of the first hospital systems in the area to introduce the updated procedure to treat atrial fibrillation, also known as AFib.

Marco made signs for his baskets.

He put each animal.

Where it belonged.

For more than 20 years, Rae Temples has helped shape young minds in the Bangor area school district as a kindergarten teacher.

Time to put away your toys.

I love young children.

You have to be up and moving and ready to go.

Perhaps they just weren't tired enough yet.

But when the 57 year old's energy level dropped, she knew something was wrong.

I had started experiencing like rapid heart rate or pounding, more so at night.

So when I went to my primary doctor for a regular visit, she set me up with a two day Holter monitor, and apparently they found something.

So she sent me to a cardiologist and they diagnosed A-fib.

The Mount Bethel woman underwent a cardiac ablation in January using older technology where doctors freeze a section of the heart to correct an irregular heart rhythm.

I was very nervous about it.

Obviously, it went fine, but it didn't take care of the problem as much as we had hoped.

She found herself back in the operating room less than six months later for another ablation, but this time with new technology.

A pulsed field ablation.

This time around, everything about it was so much better.

I came out.

I did not have any soreness or pain.

A pulsed field ablation is used to treat heart conditions, including one of the most common called A-fib, which is when a patient has a fast heartbeat.

If you have a slow heart rate, you need something like a pacemaker to help your heart.

If it is a fast heart rate, you can do either medication to slow it down or what we call ablation.

Dr. Sudip Nanda is a cardiologist with St Luke's University Health Network.

So this is your heart.

Left upper chamber.

Ablation means you go inside the heart with different catheters.

You map the heart and find out what the abnormal circuit is.

And then once you have identified whether it is one source or a full circuit, you can either burn it or freeze it and take care of the abnormal circuit.

And then your heart goes back into its normal rhythm.

So you are deploying, rotate, deploy again, change to flowers.

Nanda is one of five St Luke's Electrophysiologists who perform Ablations at their Fountain Hill location.

He says the old technology uses a straight catheter that delivers extreme heat or cold with a pencil like tip.

While the new technology uses a tool that can be formed into a basket or flower shape while in the heart.

And now this new form of delivery is pulse field where you have a very high voltage over 2000 volts and energy pulse.

The energy goes into the cells which you want to effect, create force within them when they become leaky and then they die out.

Nanda went on to say This new form is safer, faster and leaves patients with a less painful recovery.

So traditional ablation involves one is radiofrequency, which is heat mediated, one is cryo, which is essentially causing a frostbite.

In both of them, you have to be extremely careful of injuring surrounding structures.

Most common, the foot pipe, which is behind the left atrium where you are ablating that if you do damage it and there is a chance of a fatal complication.

The electrophysiologist says there is also a chance of injuring a nerve which supplies the diaphragm or breathing muscle.

But that does not happen using this new tool.

He adds his patients would often wake up with severe chest pain and deep breathing, but that has changed with the updated procedure as well.

I'm very optimistic that this time it will work.

The St Luke's team says they've been studying the new form of cardiac ablation for the past two years before investing in the technology and using it over the past few months.

The cardiologist says the other types of ablations will still be needed in some cases, but this will become the primary way to fix this type of heart condition.

Moving forward.

That'll do it for this edition of Living in the Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you stay happy and healthy.