Assessment of right ventricular afterload by pressure waveform analysis in acute pulmonary hypertension

Figure 1 Pulmonary pressure and flow register (top) with the first derivative of the pulmonary arterial pressure (bottom) where the main events are defined as follows. a: Diastolic pressure and beginning of ejection; b: Inflection point (peak pulmonary flow and first minimum of dPAP/dt); c: End of ejection. PAP: Pulmonary artery pressure; dPAP/dt: First derivative of PAP; PF: Pulmonary flow.

Figure 2 Method for obtaining the characteristic impedance (Z_C) of the pulmonary artery.

Figure 3 Time-domain analysis of pulmonary pressure and flow of a representative sheep in each of the experimental conditions. Ti, Ts, Ttot: Incident, systolic and total times; Ps, Pi, Pd: Systolic, incident and diastolic pressures.

Figure 4 Correlation between pulse pressure (Pp) and augmentation index (AI) with the energy lost by the RV due to the reflected wave during ejection (E_W), and the characteristic impedance (Z_C).