Author

N. Marrouche

View on Semantic Scholar

2 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Open access Aug 2026

Impact of early catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction-real-world evidence.

INTRODUCTION Catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF) has been shown to reduce mortality and heart failure (HF) progression in patients with AF and HF with reduced ejection fraction; however, outcomes in HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), especially the optimal timing of ablation, remain uncertain. OBJECTIVES To evaluate long-term outcomes of catheter ablation in patients with AF and HFpEF based on the temporal correlation between the AF diagnosis and the ablation procedure utilizing real-world data. METHODS In this observational cohort study using the U.S. Collaborative Network in TriNetX, adults with AF and HFpEF between October 2018 and October 2024 were identified. After 1:1 propensity score matching, 5550 patients were included. The primary endpoint was a composite of cardioversion, new antiarrhythmic drug (AAD) therapy, or repeat AF ablation after a 3-month blanking period. Secondary endpoints included hospitalization, mortality, HF exacerbation, and AAD use up to 4 years of follow-up. Outcomes were compared between patients undergoing ablation within 1 year of AF diagnosis and those having ablation after 1 year. RESULTS Over a mean follow-up of 742 ± 489 days, early AF ablation was associated with lower risks of the primary endpoint (hazard ratio (HR) 0.81, 95% CI 0.76-0.87, p < 0.001), reduced hospitalization (HR 0.77, 95% CI 0.70-0.87, p < 0.001), and lower AAD Class I or III use (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.77-0.88, p < 0.001). No significant differences were observed in HF exacerbations (HR 0.99, 95% CI 0.89-1.00, p = 0.950) or mortality (HR 1.18, 95% CI 0.91-1.53, p = 0.211). CONCLUSION Early catheter ablation was associated with a decreased all-cause hospitalization and AF recurrence in HFpEF patients but did not reduce HF exacerbations or mortality.

M. Moersdorf, M. Abou-Khalil, C. El Khoury et al. · Clinical Research in Cardiol... · 0 citations

Preprint Aug 2026

Intervention-Aware Clinical World Model for Post-Op Outcome Forecasting in Cardiology

Many clinical prediction models treat post-intervention outcomes as a one-step mapping from baseline measurements to a future endpoint. However, recovery after a procedure often unfolds as an irregular trajectory: clinical observations, medication changes, repeat interventions, and physiological measurements are recorded asynchronously and can change risk assessment over time. We propose an intervention-aware clinical world model that represents each patient with a structured latent state and evolves it through time-ordered post-intervention events. The model first encodes baseline imaging into a 3D spatial latent state. It then updates this state using procedural context, static covariates, elapsed time, and peri-event physiological embeddings. Follow-up imaging provides training-only supervision through a latent forecasting objective. We apply the framework to atrial fibrillation ablation. During the 90-day recovery window, irregular post-procedure records provide clinically meaningful evidence for long-term recurrence risk. In repeated internal cross-validation on DECAAF-II, our model achieves AUROC 0.756 and AUPRC 0.777 for recurrence prediction. It also achieves a scar-extent MAE of 2.971 percentage points without requiring follow-up MRI intensities at inference. The learned state supports recurrence-risk queries at different horizons and retrospective input editing of blanking-period records.

Y. Chung, Yingshuo Liu, Abboud Hassan et al. · 0 citations