A technical and data analytic approach to pressure-volume loops over numerous cardiac cycles

Cardiac pressure-volume (PV) loop analysis is the reference standard for studying the cardiovascular implications of clinical perturbations (eg, heart failure, aortic occlusion, hypovolemia) and is a benchmark for comparisons with noninvasive alternatives (eg, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging). Historically, most PV loop analyses were of individual cardiac cycles for which the options to analyze PV loops using off-the-shelf software were limited, and home-grown analysis software often lacked peer review or code-sharing. Our aim was to describe a start-to-finish implementation of PV loops for determination of hemodynamic parameters in swine, to provide technical advice for vascular access and proceduralization, and to describe data capture, curation, preprocessing, and analysis of raw PV time data. We have provided a novel data analytic method to programmatically analyze raw PV loop data beyond single cardiac cycles and real, raw swine PV loop data and the accompanying MATLAB (MathWorks, Inc, Natick, Mass) code as an example of how to process and analyze raw data directly.