**6. Conclusion**

The ideal surgical procedure for AF would be a minimally invasive procedure that does not require cardiopulmonary bypass and should preserve normal atrial physiology, have minimal morbidity, and have a high success rate. Achieving this goal will require a better understanding of the mechanism of AF in individual patients and tailoring of treatment approaches. This would have significant advantages and prevent both over and under-ablation. This will require better preoperative diagnostics to identify mechanisms of AF. Non-invasive ECG imaging has a great potential in this era [75, 76] that could be beneficial to tailor lesion sets as well as to decide which specific ablation modalities for individual patients.
