Monitoring Cardiac Output Using Impedance Cardiography: A Technical Review

Cardiac Output (CO) is an important parameter to be monitored continuously during most of the critical surgeries such as liver transplantation. CO is the volume of the blood pumped by each ventricle of the heart per minute. CO has been considered as one of the vital parameters in early diagnosis of cardiac dysfunction. The established clinical methods for monitoring CO which are considered to be “gold standard”, such as thermodilution are all invasive. Impedance Cardiography (ICG) is a non-invasive electrical sensor-based technique which has been gaining popularity during last few decades for monitoring CO. However, the efficacy and reliability of ICG has been debated over ever since. This paper compares and discusses the work reported so far on ICG.