Continuous monitoring of coordinated cardiovascular responses.

The continuous separate monitoring of cardiac and vascular functions provide important insights on cardiovascular regulation. In the last years several attempts have failed at demonstrating the feasibility of using Pulse Wave Velocity as a surrogate indicator of arterial blood pressure. Upon the hypothesis that the cause of PWV unreliability is vasomotor activity, in this paper we develop an extended model of lumped arterial tree that copes with changes in vessels diameter. The benefit of this approach is twofold: on the one hand one might correct the effects of vasomotor activity on the estimation of arterial blood pressure on the basis of PWV, and on the other hand one obtains continuous non-invasive estimations of Cardiac Output and Total Peripheral Resistance.