A computerised dichromatic earpiece densitometer for the measurement of cardiac output.

This study assesses a precalibrated dichromatic earpiece densitometer and microprocessor for the measurement of cardiac output by indocyanine green dye dilution. The measured cardiac output is compared with values of cardiac output simultaneously determined using a cuvette densitometer. The microprocessor computation of cardiac output agreed very closely with the cardiac output determined by manual calculation from the same dye dilution curves (standard deviation +/- 1.47%). The reproducibility of the earpiece densitometer (standard deviation +/- 5.2%) was virtually identical to that of the cuvette densitometer (+/- 5.3%). In a comparison of earpiece and cuvette densitometers for 60 measurements of cardiac output following pulmonary arterial injection of dye and for 50 measurements following femoral venous injection of dye, correlation coefficients were 0.83 and 0.78 and the standard deviations of the differences of simultaneous measurements were 7.2% and 8.3% respectively. The instrument offers an accurate reproducible and relatively noninvasive technique for measuring cardiac output.