Clinical Validation of Non-Invasive Cardiac Output Monitoring in Healthy Pregnant Women.
OBJECTIVE
Non-invasive hemodynamic monitoring has the potential to be a valuable clinical tool for the screening and management of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. The objective of this study was to validate the clinical utility of the non-invasive cardiac output monitoring (NICOM) system in pregnant women.


METHODS
Twenty healthy pregnant women with a singleton pregnancy at 22 to 26 weeks' gestation were enrolled in this study. Measures of heart rate, stroke volume, and cardiac output were obtained through NICOM and compared with Doppler echocardiography.


RESULTS
NICOM significantly overestimated measures of both stroke volume and cardiac output compared with Doppler echocardiography (95 ± 4 vs. 73 ± 4 mL, P < 0.0001; and 7.4 ± 0.2 vs. 5.6 ± 0.2 L/min, P < 0.0001; respectively).


CONCLUSIONS
There is no gold standard for the measurement of cardiac output in the setting of pregnancy. However, once normal values have been established, NICOM has the potential to be a useful clinical tool for monitoring maternal hemodynamics in pregnant women. Further investigation regarding the validity of NICOM is required in larger populations of healthy and hypertensive pregnant women to determine whether this device is appropriate for maternal hemodynamic assessment during pregnancy.
['McLaughlin|Kelsey|K|', 'Wright|Stephen P|SP|', 'Kingdom|John C P|JCP|', 'Parker|John D|JD|']
D000328:Adult D002302:Cardiac Output D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic D011247:Pregnancy D011262:Pregnancy Trimester, Second D011295:Prenatal Care D012016:Reference Values D015203:Reproducibility of Results D016216:Ultrasonography, Prenatal
non-invasive cardiac output monitoring hemodynamics hypertension pregnancy Maternal