Technologies

Introduction

People with progressive heart failure need ejection fraction (EF) measurements as critical information in diagnosis and treatment. EF is the percentage of the total volume in a ventricular chamber of the heart that is ejected per beat, a key measure of overall heart function. A technology allowing continuous monitoring of EF would allow for much better patent care than current capabilities where waits of many hours are commonly required to obtain a single EF reading. In addition, a system allowing such data to be gathered at the home, rather than in a hospital, would be a major cost saver for the care of heart patients.

Description of Technology

Using blood pressure information derived from either invasive or non-invasive procedures, the resulting waveforms are used to calculate a personalized circulatory system for a given patient by fitting a general circulatory model to the waveforms to obtain a personalized circulatory model. From that model, predicted ejection fractions can be calculated. Commercially available medical diagnostic equipment is used to obtain the required input information on individual patients, namely systemic arterial pressure (SAP) and/or left ventricular pressure (LVP). This technology is essentially a mathematical analysis innovation, in software form, that can be run by commercially available PCs for hospital use, using the above SAP/LVP waveforms as inputs to predict EFs. A major feature of this technology is that the software-predicted total volume of blood in a ventricle, and the predicted total volume ejected per beat from the ventricle have the same proportionality constants which cancel out when determining the EF fraction, allowing for a very accurate prediction of the EF on a continuous basis. There is no current technology available which can do this.