British journal of anaesthesia
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Early haemodynamic assessment is of particular importance in the evaluation of haemodynamically compromised patients, but is often precluded by the invasiveness and complexity of the established cardiac output (CO) monitoring techniques. The FloTrac/Vigileo system allows minimally invasive CO determination based on the arterial pressure waveform derived from any standard arterial catheter, and the algorithm underlying CO calculation was recently modified to allow a more precise estimate of aortic compliance. ⋯ Despite the updated algorithm, AP-CO still showed a limited agreement with the reference-CO and systematically underestimated the CO so that the method is not suitable to replace invasive CO monitoring at present.