Assessment of Hemodynamic Changes During Weaning From Mechanical Ventilation With Flo-Trac Vigileo (TM) Monitor.

Failure to wean from mechanical ventilation (failure to get the patients off the breathing machine) is associated with prolonged stay in the intensive care unit and increased risk of death. Some patients have difficulty successfully getting off the ventilator and breathing on their own. Usually this difficulty is due to lung problems. But sometimes it is due to heart problems, or heart failure. To improve a patient's chances of successfully getting off the ventilator early, it is helpful to the doctors to know if patient has heart failure and to measure how severe. With the new monitoring system being studied here, doctors may be able to detect and measure heart failure more easily. A new monitor (Vigileo TM) that is connected with a specific cable (Flo-TracTM) to a catheter that is inside the patient's artery (arterial line) has lately been developed. This monitor can estimate the amount of blood that the heart is pumping per minute, known as cardiac output. The heart is supposed to pump blood harder when a patient is being weaned from the breathing machine. With the above mentioned monitor, we hope to detect those patients whose hearts are weak and are not pumping as hard as they should.