Computer-Aided Clinical Decision System: Differential Diagnosis and Treatment of Essential Hypertension by a Novel Noninvasive Hemodynamic Analyzer

The objective of this paper was to compute cardiac out-put (CO) noninvasively and other hemodynamic parameters by a new computer-aided decision system: a Noninvasive Hemodynamic Analyzer (NHA), and use the obtained data to demonstrate hemodynamic instability of two hypertensive patients. The NHA is composed of several instruments, in-cluding an electronic blood pressure instrument (with pulse curve detection), oxymeter (SpO2), hemoglobinometer and a core-body thermometer. Their data inputs are the dynamic characteristics of the patient’s condition. The static charac-teristics including, date of birth, sex, height, weight and test date are entered manually or via computer. These in-puts are analyzed by a high performance multi-function data acquisition computer. In a recently published retro-spective study of 203 ICU patients thermodilution cardiac output data were compared with NHA computed CO val-ues. Statistical evaluation, concerning bias, precision and accuracy showed clinically acceptable ranges according to a literature survey. The hemodynamic pattern of two essen-tial hypertensive patients were computed by the NHA and diagnostic and therapeutic directions were demonstrated. The NHA computer-aided clinical decision system provides reliable guidance for hemodynamic evaluation and leads to a scientifically based differential diagnosis of hypertensive patients as a promising screening method. Since the NHA system can function separately from direct patient measure-ment, it can be ideally applied to telemedicine applications