Fick's method

Project objectives

Monitoring vital signs in intensive care, such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, cardiac output, and respiratory rate, is essential for physicians to assess the patient's health, predict potential complications, and intervene promptly in emergencies. Circulatory disorders are a common feature of sepsis, trauma, surgery, and many other common diseases. A detailed assessment of circulatory function is therefore essential in the clinical management of a large number of patients. In this context, a highly clinically significant parameter is cardiac output: the amount of blood pumped by one ventricle per minute.

Cardiac output monitoring technologies are therefore of paramount importance in assessing patient status in the operating room, intensive care units, emergency departments, and other hospital settings where continuous assessment of clinical progress is required, as well as during diagnosis (e.g., low cardiac output associated with tachycardia is a symptom of serious cardiac dysfunction). The environments in which these systems are typically used are highly complex, and the mobility of physicians and their assistants is critical, especially in emergency situations or during highly precise interventions. In such a context, it is essential that the devices be as simple to use as possible, take up as little space as possible, and ensure autonomous and continuous operation.

The research objective is to achieve significant technical and scientific progress in the use of new technologies for continuous cardiac output monitoring in patients undergoing mechanical ventilation. Starting from the need to simplify the scope of intervention for physicians and their assistants, the project's goal is to create an integrated system that combines multiple measurements obtained from different instruments typically used to monitor critically ill patients. This avoids the introduction of additional technological components that would increase the complexity of the environment itself. The research activity can be broken down into the following steps:

• Identification of a valid principle that allows the instantaneous value of cardiac output to be traced through the processing of information already used in clinical practice

• Design of the hardware system that includes the integration of sensors and their optimal interfacing with the human body for the detection of physiological parameters of interest

• Development of software, implemented on PC, for control, real-time data processing and display presentation

• Evaluation of the safety of use of the system in contact with humans

• Verification of clinical aspects and patient testing using techniques already accredited as the gold standard of reference.

Start and end date

31/10/2010 - 30/04/2013

Project Manager

Prof. Sergio Silvestri - Confirmed Associate Professor

Coordinating institution of the project

Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma

Other Institutions involved

COSMED srl

Funding source(s).

FILAS, art. 182 paragraph 4 letter c of the Regional Law 04/06 – PST, ITINERIS2