Inverse thermodilution with conventional pulmonary artery catheters for the assessment of cerebral, hepatic, renal, and femoral blood flow.

Assessment of regional blood flow changes is difficult in the clinical setting. We tested whether conventional pulmonary artery catheters (PACs) can be used to measure regional venous blood flows by inverse thermodilution (ITD). Inverse thermodilution was tested in vitro and in vivo using perivascular ultrasound Doppler (USD) flow probes as a reference.