CardiAcc: Noninvasive Cardiac Output Monitoring

In the US alone, heart failure affects the lives of 5.1 million people and costs the healthcare system $32 billion a year. Cardiac output (CO) is considered the Dzholy graildz of hemodynamic monitoring because of its robust ability to reflect a patient’s cardiac function. Defined as the volume of blood the heart pumps per minute, CO provides an estimate of whole body oxygen perfusion and is thus a much neededparameter for patients at risk of heart failure. Clinicians use CO to improve fluid management and administer timely therapeutic interventions that can reduce patient mortality by 14%, morbidity by 30% and length of hospital stays by 10%. However, the clinical gold standard for CO monitoring, the pulmonary artery (PA) catheter, has significant complications associated with it such as arrhythmia, pulmonary infarction, thrombosis, vein tearing and infection. The PA catheter use has declined 65% in ICU patients because its invasiveness often outweighs the benefits of obtaining CO, limiting the number of patients that can be monitored. While other less invasive methods exist, they have not been implemented widespread because of significant shortcomings, such as high cost, high intra-operator variability and inaccuracy in critically ill patients.

CardiAcc has developed a noninvasive monitoring system based on scientific insight into a cardiovascular model that combines patient-specific data and noninvasive biosignals into accurate measurements of CO. CardiAcc’s integrated sensor system simultaneously measures multiple hemodynamic parameters, including pressure, acoustic and electrical waveforms. Preliminary retrospective studies at the Johns Hopkins Hospital have demonstrated that our CO values for healthy patients fall within clinically acceptable precision and accuracy thresholds. Unlike any other CO monitors, our method allows for low-cost, real-time, continuous, noninvasive and accurate monitoring of CO. CardiAcc’s mission is to bring CO monitoring to a larger number of ICU and OR patients, allowing clinicians to make timely interventions and improve patient outcomes.