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Letter

Is supra-ventricular arrhythmia a reason for the bad performance of the FlowTrac device?

Andreas Umgelter email, Wolfgang Reindl, Roland M Schmid and Wolfgang Huber

II Medizinische Klinik und Poliklinik, Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technischen Universität München, Ismaningerstraße 22, 81644 München, Germany

author email corresponding author email

Critical Care 2007, 11:406doi:10.1186/cc5154

Published: 12 February 2007


See related research by Sander et al., http://ccforum.com/content/10/6/R164

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

In their recent paper evaluating arterial waveform analysis as a tool to measure cardiac output (CO), Michael Sander and colleagues do not provide data on the heart rhythms of their cardiac surgery patients [1]. As the FloTrac (Flowtrac/Vigileo, Edwards Lifescience, Munich, Germany) device calculates CO from an arterial pressure-based algorithm, integrating vessel compliance and peripheral resistance effects, it seems plausible that these measurements may be influenced by cardiac arrhythmia.


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