• G Rödig, C Keyl, A Liebold, and J Hobbhahn.
• Department of Anaesthesia, University Hospital, Regensburg, Germany.
• Eur J Anaesthesiol. 1998 Mar 1;15(2):196-201.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to analyse the clinical agreement between cardiac output measurements, obtained using a newly available continuous thermodilution technique, and the conventional intermittent bolus technique. Twenty-four cardiac surgical patients were intra-operatively monitored using both techniques. Additionally, two different averaging modes for the continuous thermodilution technique, either the previous 6 min (group 1) or 3 min (group 2) were compared. The mean difference between the continuous thermodilution technique and the intermittent bolus technique (bias), were calculated at eight selected time points. These ranged from -0.09 to 0.42 litres min-1 in group 1 and from -0.02 to 0.18 litres min-1 in group 2. There were significant differences at any time point between the groups. The relative error between continuous thermodilution and intermittent bolus techniques was < 15% for the majority of measurements and was significantly higher in group 1 compared with group 2 just prior to cardiopulmonary bypass. Thus, the continuous thermodilution technique produced a clinically acceptable level of accuracy compared with the intermittent bolus technique measurements, especially when using an averaging mode for the previous 3 min.

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