Non-invasive monitoring of pulmonary artery pressure at the bedside.

Abstract

Current solutions for the monitoring of pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) in patients suffering from pulmonary hypertension are limited to invasive means. Non-invasive alternatives, such as Doppler echocardiography, are incompatible with continuous monitoring due to their dependency on qualified personnel to perform the measurements. In the present study, a novel non-invasive and unsupervised approach based on the use of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is presented. The approach was evaluated in three healthy subjects undergoing hypoxia-induced variations in PAP. A timing parameter - physiologically linked to the PAP via the so-called pulse wave velocity principle - was automatically extracted from the EIT data. Reference systolic PAP estimates were obtained by echocardiography. Strong correlation scores (r e [0.844, 0.990]) were found between the EIT-derived parameter and the reference PAP, thereby suggesting the validity of the proposed approach. If confirmed in larger datasets, these findings could open the way for a new branch of fully non-invasive hemodynamic monitors for patients with pulmonary hypertension.