Abstract
The Intra-Aortic Balloon Pump (IABP) is widely used in clinical settings with patients that have severe cardiovascular issues. The pump uses a counterpulsation mechanism to decrease the left ventricular afterload as well as maintaining the cardiac output. By manipulating the aortic pressure waveform, the myocardial perfusion increases during diastole due to the increased diastolic pressure. In this work, we are proposing a framework that can be used to determine the main cardiovascular determinants; peripheral resistance, compliance, and cardiac output using the counterpulsation mechanism. The proposed method uses the pump action as well as a pressure transducer (sensor) that comes with several versions of the pump. The generated pressure signal, as well as the known balloon volumetric changes, serve as inputs to the computational algorithm that is based on mathematical optimization. Although more experimental work is required to validate the proposed framework, the results showed that it could generate reasonable real-time predictions for the main cardiovascular parameters obtained from the pressure waveform during the operation of the IABP.
