Clinical Utility of Continuous Noncontact Cardiac Function Monitoring via Fiber-Optic Micro-Vibration Sensing...

Continuous monitoring of cardiac function may contribute to improving clinical outcomes in heart failure (HF) patients. A fiber-optic micro-vibration sensing system (FO-MVSS) that was previously developed by our group could make possible the noncontact and continuous measurement of the myocardial performance index (MPI) to assess cardiac function. However, the utility of MPI obtained by FO-MVSS (MPI_FO-MVSS) in HF patients requires investigation.

Utilizing a case-control design, 72 HF patients and 72 control patients matched for age, gender, and body mass index were recruited. Both FO-MVSS and echocardiography were used to measure the duration of the various phases of the cardiac cycle, thereby deriving the corresponding MPI. The MPI_FO-MVSS of 23 hospitalized patients with HF was continuously monitored to evaluate its predictive value for the improvement of cardiac function.

The MPI_FO-MVSS was in excellent agreement with the MPI obtained by echocardiography (intraclass correlation coefficient: 0.94, p < 0.001). The MPI_FO-MVSS exhibited statistically significant correlations with left ventricular ejection fraction (r = -0.78, p < 0.001) and N-terminal prohormone brain natriuretic peptide (r = 0.66, p < 0.001). The MPI_FO-MVSS had an excellent performance in discriminating HF patients from control patients, with an area under the curve of 0.98 (p < 0.001). Moreover, among continuously monitored patients, the change in MPI_FO-MVSS was predictive of clinical outcomes (the kappa coefficient: 0.91, p < 0.001).

Our study presents a novel approach to using noncontact MPI_FO-MVSS for continuous cardiac function evaluation in patients with HF. The MPI_FO-MVSS may serve as an accurate, sensitive, and noninvasive indicator of cardiac dysfunction.