Hemodynamic Management Guided by Esophageal Doppler

The esophageal Doppler technique has progressively emerged as a minimally invasive and reliable tool for measuring aortic blood flow and estimating cardiac output. Numerous studies have emphasized its clinical utility by showing improved outcome in surgical patients when hemodynamic therapy was driven by algorithms based on esophageal Doppler data. In the setting of the ICU, the ability of esophageal Doppler to track the changes in aortic blood flow in a beat-to-beat manner makes it particularly suitable for predicting fluid responsiveness, either by the measurement of the aortic blood flow respiratory variation or by testing the effects of passive leg raising.