This is the podcast, ICU rounds.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Guy.

I'm an associate professor of surgery and director of the Burns Center

at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Welcome back to the podcast.

The topic that we're going to talk about today is that of cardiac output monitors.

And I want to talk specifically about some of the physiological principles that are used in the different cardiac monitors and try to compare the different monitoring techniques based on the physiology that's involved.

So that if monitor A is better than

monitor B, perhaps you need to understand what are the physiological methods that

determines cardiac output or preload and what are some of the shortcomings and strengths of

those various methods.

The first question you need to really ask yourself is what is it that I want to

measure and what is it that I'm trying to make better on the patient? If I have a patient

who is in shock and we've gone over this over and over again that shock isn't necessarily

defined by a blood pressure, it's really defined by auction delivery. How is it that I can improve

auction delivery to say the brain harder kidneys?

Do I need to improve the mean arterial blood pressure? Do I need to improve cardiac output?

Do I need to improve oxygen delivery? So what is it precisely that we want to measure in a

particular patient at a particular time? And how about, how is it that we go about measuring

that particular item now the

different monitoring devices it's crucial understand what is really being measured or monitored

uh you can look at various monitors and they may give you a cardiac output on a particular patient

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