3.1. Study selection and quality assessment
This meta-analysis includes 20 studies with a total of 3,610 AF patients
(1,564 patients for ICE and 2,046 patients for TEE) consisting of 10
observational two-arm studies (965 ICE patients and 2,046 TEE
patients)[6-15]and 10 single-arm studies (599 ICE
patients)[16-25]. The selection flowchart was
displayed in Figure 1 . The average age of the patients included
in the studies ranged from 71.3 to 80.3 years. Among the included
clinical studies, the mean CHA2DS2‐VASc score and HAS-BLED score ranged
from 3.9 to 5.3 and 2.4 to 4.4. Eleven studies included Watchman or
Watchman FLX[6, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 19-23], six
included the ACP or Amulet device[10, 11, 14, 18, 24,
25] and three studies included both[7, 12, 14].
The baseline characteristics and procedure-related indexes of the
eligible studies were presented in Table 1 . In this
meta-analysis, all two-arm studies had a moderate-to-high quality
(Supplementary Table 1 ). Ten single-arm studies all had a score
higher than fifteen (Supplementary Table 1 ).