The clinical value of stroke volume variations to assess intravascular fluid status in critically ill patients is well known. Electrical impedance tomography is a noninvasive monitoring technology that has been primarily used to assess ventilation. We investigated the potential of electrical impedance tomography to measure left ventricular stroke volume variation as an expression of heart-lung interactions. The objective of this study was thus to determine in a set of different hemodynamic conditions whether stroke volume variation measured by electrical impedance tomography correlates with those derived from an aortic ultrasonic flow probe and arterial pulse contour analysis.
