Letter

Applying logic to pulmonary artery catheter use

Horst E Kunig¹ , Michael R Pinsky² and Lothar Engelmann³

¹  PO Box 192, Saltsburg, PA 15681-0192, USA

²  Critical Care Medicine, Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Disease and Anesthesiology, 606 Scaife Hall, 3550 Terrace Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA

³  University of Leipzig, Zentrum fuer Innere Medizin, Abteilung Intensivmedizin, Liebigstrasse 20, 04103 Leipzig Germany

author email corresponding author email

Critical Care 2008, 12:421doi:10.1186/cc6928

Published:	7 July 2008

See related journal club critique by Mansour et al., http://ccforum.com/content/12/1/301

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Mansour and colleagues recommend not routinely using the pulmonary artery catheter to guide hemodynamic management in the intensive care unit, because the perceived benefits are largely intangible [1]. Pulmonary artery catheter monitoring of the right ventricular ejection fraction (RVef) and of the right ventricular end-diastolic volume (EDV), however, reflects powerful yet underutilized relationships that assess right ventricular performance.