Three-dimensional histologic reconstruction of remnant functional accessory atrioventricular myocardial connections in a case of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome

Myocardial bundles working as accessory pathways in Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome are generally tiny tissues, so elucidating the culprit histology of atrioventricular (AV) myocardial connections requires careful serial sectioning of the AV junction. We performed a postmortem examination of accessory AV myocardial connections in an 84-year-old man who died from pneumonia 20 years after surgical cryoablation for WPW syndrome. Three-dimensional reconstruction images of serial histologic sections revealed accessory AV connections between the atrial and ventricular myocardium in the vicinity of the cryoablation scar. The remnant myocardial bridge was 4 mm wide and made up of multiple discontinuous fibers. This case was informative in that it provided for visualization of the histologic morphology of a remnant bundle of Kent.