Cardiac output assessment using oxygen consumption estimated from the left ventricular pressure-volume area.

Use of a majority of structural variables (age, sex, height) to estimate oxygen consumption in the calculation of cardiac output (CO) by the Fick principle does not account for changes in physiological conditions. To improve this limitation, oxygen consumption was estimated based on the left ventricular pressure-volume area. A pilot study with 10 patients undergoing right cardiac catheterization showed that this approach was successful to estimate CO (r=0,73, vs.