Towards Automating the Pulmonary Artery Catheter: a Canine Validation Study

We have recently introduced a unique technique to automatically estimate both cardiac output (CO) and left atrial pressure (LAP) by pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) waveform analysis. In this contribution, we review the technique and present its evaluation with respect to gold standard, but highly invasive, reference aortic flow probe CO and direct LAP catheter measurements from two dogs during various pharmacological interventions. We report that the technique achieved an overall CO error of 15.3% and an overall LAP error of 17.1% over a wide hemodynamic range. For comparison, the overall LAP error of classic end-diastolic PAP estimates was about three times as large. With further successful testing, the technique may ultimately be employed so as to effectively automate the pulmonary artery catheter.