The use of pneumoperitoneum during laparoscopic surgery as a model to study pathophysiologic phenomena: the correlation of cardiac functionality with computerized acoustic indices--preliminary data.

BACKGROUND Induction of pneumoperitoneum during laparoscopic surgery leads to diverse cardiovascular changes that can be used as a model to study pathophysiologic phenomena. Application of novel signal processing and figure extraction enabled searching for correlation between various signals and pathophysiologic setting. Our aim was to quantitatively correlate cardiac functionality (as expressed by cardiac output) with the spectral energy of the first heart sound (S1) obtained from the phonocardiogram, during laparoscopic surgery. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients who were scheduled for elective laparoscopic operations were enrolled in the study. Cardiac output was maximally changed during anesthesia and abdominal insufflation and was obtained from the arterial pressure wave (FloTrac™ sensor and Vigileo™ monitor [Edwards Lifesciences Ltd.]). Heart signals were recorded during surgery from each subject by a computerized digital data acquisition system. The automatic analysis of the heart sounds included segmentation that was based on the energy envelope of the heart sounds together with analysis of the electrocardiogram signal. We analyzed the morphology of the sounds using hierarchial cluster analysis to remove those sounds that were not reliably recorded. The magnitude of the amplitude of heart sounds was obtained by using the Hilbert transform for each heartbeat. Statistical analysis was based on linear regression. RESULTS Following exclusion of 3 patients (mainly because of technical reasons), we were left with 7 patients who demonstrated statistically significant positive correlation between cardiac index and the amplitude of S1 (regression coefficient between 0.4 and 0.9, P<.05). Linear regression analysis was done on the normalized values of all 7 patients and was found to be highly significant. CONCLUSIONS In this study we have demonstrated significant linear correlation between the acoustic amplitude (spectral energy) of S1 and cardiac functionality, through sophisticated computerized analysis, using the pneumoperitoneum model for changing the cardiac output.