Non-Invasive Determination of Cardiac Output by Inertgas Rebreathing Method (NICO)

The cardiac output (CO) is an important parameter in the diagnosis and therapy of cardiac diseases. The current standard methods for the determination of the CO, however, are either invasive (e.g. right heart catheterization) or technically expendable and expensive (magnetic resonance tomography, MRT). The traditional non-invasive methods of determining the CO by rebreathing of carbon dioxide are easily carried out but suffer from methodical inaccuracies. Therefore the aim of the study at hand was to evaluate a new method for determining the CO by means of the inert gas rebreathing method.