NICOM in Pregnant Women with Heart Disease

An accepted "gold standard" for hemodynamic monitoring in women with both healthy and diseased hearts is not currently available. Pregnancy is associated with significant hemodynamic changes, both during and following delivery, which can be even more profound in the structurally-abnormal heart. Clinical management of these women is based on surrogate markers of cardiac indices such as peripheral blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen saturation, rather than the use of invasive testing due to its associated complications. Echocardiography has largely replaced PAC in the obstetric population to measure cardiac output due to its non-invasive nature and good correlation with PAC18. However, its use is limited in the intrapartum period due to the need for clinical expertise in obtaining and interpreting the images. The proposed study has the potential to validate bio-reactance cardiac output monitoring using the NICOM against echocardiography for use in structurally normal and abnormal pregnant hearts in order to better drive goal-directed (specifically delivery mode) therapy through continuous hemodynamic monitoring during the second and third stages of labor, and 24 hours postpartum.