Cardiac output monitoring

Cardiac output monitoring has become commonplace amongst the standard monitoring in anaesthesia for major surgery and in intensive care. Multiple techniques are used, employing different models to calculate flow, which cannot be directly measured. Each method has differing advantage and disadvantage profiles and so the choice of device should consider a balance of invasiveness, usability, reliability and validity. Trend monitoring is generally emphasized over absolute values. Keywords Aortic Doppler; bioimpedance; cardiac output; echocardiography; indicator dilution; oesophageal Doppler; pulse contour analysis; pulse waveform analysis; thermodilution