Preliminary study on the estimation of Emax using single-beat methods during assistance with rotary blood pumps

Recently, rotary blood pumps (RBPs) have been used as bridge to recovery. In such application the RBP might be weaned once the cardiac function has been recovered. In such cases, the detection of the cardiac function is fundamental for the treatment efficiency. However, most of the widely used cardiac function indices (CFIs) were proposed for unassisted hearts and have not been completely evaluated under assistance. In contrast, Emax, which is known as a reliable CFI, has already been validated under assistance with RBP. However, since the conventional method for the estimation of Emax has some limitations for the clinical application, the objective of this study was to evaluate different single-beat estimation methods qualitatively and also quantitatively using in vivo data. The preliminary results showed that although single-beat estimation have more clinical applicability, not all those estimation methods are suitable for the RBP assistance.