Vaidehi Paranjape, Natalia Henao-Guerrero, Giulio Menciotti, All SACS and Siddharth Saksena VT Dept of Civil and Enviro Engineering have published  "Evaluation of Electrical Cardiometry for Measuring Cardiac Output and Derived Hemodynamic Variables in Comparison with Lithium Dilution in Anesthetized Dogs" in Animals.

Cardiac output (CO) measurement devices are classified as invasive, minimally invasive, or noninvasive depending on their level of invasiveness for CO data acquisition. Pulmonary artery thermodilution is the ‘gold standard’ CO technique. This method is more accurate, but its invasiveness possesses risks. Minimally invasive lithium dilution (LiD) is slowly replacing thermodilution as a reference standard in animal research due to its excellent agreement and acceptable performance. Monitoring CO with standard cardiovascular parameters (i.e., blood pressure and heart rate) in anesthetized animals can potentially improve patient care and case outcomes. Hence, we evaluated noninvasive electrical cardiometry (EC)-measured CO and other EC-acquired hemodynamic variables, and analyzed them against CO measured using LiD in healthy, anesthetized dogs during different treatments (dobutamine, esmolol, phenylephrine, and high-dose isoflurane) impacting CO values. Overall, EC showed good agreement with LiD, but it exhibited consistent underestimation when the CO values were higher. The percentage error was low and within published standards, and a good trending pattern was exhibited by EC. The acquired EC variables followed the trends in CO obtained by LiD. EC may be a pivotal tool for monitoring trends in hemodynamics and guiding treatments for cardiovascular anesthetic complications in clinical settings.

Paranjape is assistant professor of anesthesiology and pain management, Guerrero is service chief and associate professor of anesthesiology, and Menciotti is assistant professor of cardiology in the college's Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, which is led by department head Guerrero.