Hello, my name is Jeff Guy and you're listening to the podcast surgery ICU rounds.

One of the most commonly used numbers when somebody inserts a pulmonary artery catheter is the SVO2.

And this is a number that if I had to ignore all the other 30-some-odd variables that this one produces,

this is probably the one that I would be the most interested in.

And it's always intriguing to me how on rounds people at the bedside really ignore the utility of this SVO2 number.

So I want to spend a few minutes at least talking about what sve-O-2 is and how we use it

and how you can use it to improve outcomes, hopefully, at the bedside. What sve-O-2 is, it's the

saturation, mixed venous saturation of oxygen. And what happens is on a fiber optic pulmonary catheter you have a little light that's emitted. And what that does is it

uses basically a reflectance spectroscopy and will give you a saturation

of the blood at the tip of the pulmonary catheter. And given the fact that the catheter sits in the pulmonary artery,

we call this mixed venous saturation.

And we've talked about some of the importance of venous saturation

and mixed venous saturation when we talked about the surviving subsist guidelines.

And a typical mixed venous saturation could be say,

we'll just make it 75%.

There are physiological things that can make that SVO2 go up and things that make that SVO2 go down.

What all happens too often is I'll walk into a patient's room, and you'll see one of the screens

set on the SPO2 monitors, and it's the screen typically has all the different variables, you know of the screens set on the SVO2 monitors,

and it's the screen typically has all the different variables.

You know, the cardiac output, the SvRI, the D-O-2, the V-O-2, all these other variables,

and SVO2 will be sitting there up in the corner.

The real benefit of SVO2, in my opinion, is looking at the trend of that number. Is that number trending up or is it trending down? If somebody's SVO2 goes from, say, 75 to 70 over a period of, say,

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