Echocardiography and passive leg raising in the postoperative period: A prospective observational study.

Background: Signs of hypovolaemia are frequent in the postoperative period, but not all patients need or respond to fluid administration. An increase in cardiac output (CO) after passive leg raising (PLR) has been demonstrated to be useful as a volume response predictor in non-surgical, spontaneously breathing patients.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of transthoracic echocardiography after PLR to predict fluid responsiveness in post-surgical patients.