Noninvasive Cardiovascular Diagnosis of Patients With Fully Magnetically Levitated Blood Pumps

Summary

Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) therapy has become a well-established treatment option for endstage heart-failure either as a bridge to transplant (BTT) or destination therapy (DT). Monitoring of the pump and with this the cardiac status with the HeartMate 3 (HM3) is currently very limited to infrequent log-files with one data entry every 15 minutes and only limited amount of entries. Due to the low resolution data, the standard HM3 monitoring is not feasible for the evaluation of suction events or in depth analysis of the interaction between LVAD and the remaining native heart function. Aim of this study is to develop noninvasive diagnostics of the cardiac remaining respectively recovering function derived from HeartMate 3 pump data only and compare with standard clinical diagnostic procedures. These procedures include cardiac ultrasound and ECG. After this pilot study, the newly developed methods would allow frequent, simple and automatic monitoring of patients implanted with the HeartMate 3 device. Such continuous assessment of cardiac function would massively help therapy optimization of cardiac protection and, if possible, cardiac recovery.

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

All patients with the HeartMate 3 system implanted at the Medical University of Vienna, which are able and willing to understand and sign the informed consent form, and which do not meet any exclusion criteria will be included.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Age: \<18 or \>75 years
* Inability to provide informed consent
* Patients with known intraventricular or aortic root thrombus formation or known pathology of the coagulatory system. Although an intraventricular thrombus formation is usually removed intraoperatively during the LVAD implantation procedure, the rationale for this exclusion criterion is to avoid suction of such thrombus material during possible speed changes (± 20% from the initial pump speed). Consequently, the exclusion of patients with known pathology of the coagulation system, who thus have a higher risk of developing any kind of thrombus formation, is another safety measure.
* Inaccessibility for transthoracic ultrasound diagnostics. Firstly, as described in the visit and assessment schedule (Appendix), changes in pump speed are only performed under transthoracic echo guidance. Secondly, as described above, echo parameters are required to correlate with the non-invasive CDAS pump data. Therefore, the inaccessibility of ultrasound diagnostics (e.g. due to poor image quality) is another exclusion criterion.

Conditions4

Browse More Trials