Cardiac Output Monitoring by Impedance Cardiography During Treadmill Exercise

We have modified impedance cardiography for monitoring cardiac output during stress tests. We adapted an ensemble-averaging technique for eliminating motion artifacts. We applied an array consisting of four spot ECG electrodes for impedance cardiogram (ICG) monitoring and compared it to conventional encircling band electrodes. We tested ten normal adults, compared the cardiac output obtained by our ICG monitoring system to that simultaneously obtained by the carbon dioxide (CO2) rebreathing method at rest and during three levels of treadmill exercise. The results show that the correlation coefficient between the spot electrode ICG and the CO2 rebreathing method is r = 0.90, and between the band electrode ICG and the CO2 rebreathing method is r = 0.96. If we use the peak-to-valley height of dz/dt instead of the peak height of dZ/dt in computing cardiac output, the correlation coefficient between the spot electrode ICG and the CO2 rebreathing method can be improved to r = 0.95.