Our Technology

BIOREACTANCE^® Technology

Bioreactance Technology for Non Invasive Cardiac Output Measurement (NICOM) is unique and proprietary to Cheetah Medical.

Bioreactance was developed by Cheetah Medical scientists over several years of research, development and extensive preclinical and clinical testing and validation. Bioreactance has now been used in thousands of patients worldwide, which has allowed for refinement and optimization of the technique to enable continuous and accurate non-invasive cardiac output measurement in any clinical setting, including during patient motion.

How Bioreactance Works:

The foundation of Cheetah Medical’s Bioreactance based NICOM approach is the discovery that when blood flows out of the heart, Phase Shifts are created in alternating radiofrequency electrical currents applied across the patients’ chest. Such phase shifts are conceptually similar to a Frequency Modulation, or FM, as used in FM radio transmissions.The phase shifts are measured continuously and have been shown to relate almost linearly to blood flow in the aorta.

Bioreactance Vs. bioimpedance

Bioreactance is often compared with bioimpedance, an older technology used to determine cardiac output.

Both technologies use sensors placed on the patient’s chest to deliver an electrical current of known amplitude and frequency across the thorax, but the major difference between.

Bioreactance and bioimpedance is analogous to that between FM and AM radio: With FM radio, detection of the radio signal is based on changes in signal frequency rather than changes in signal amplitude, allowing for greater fidelity in the obtained signal. FM enables significant advantages in filtering noise, for example noise coming from other electronic or physiologic emitters. This is why FM-based systems offer superior performance compared to AM.

Another key advantage of Bioreactance stems from the fact that detection of frequency modulations is insensitive to distance between the sensors, which is in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of detection of amplitude changes. Therefore, Bioreactance has the important advantage of flexibility in sensor location but also in various clinical scenarios such as morbid obesity and pleural effusion.

With Bioreactance, sensors can be placed anywhere on the thorax or even on the patient’s back. Thus, Bioreactance technology can be used in challenging clinical situations and patient populations such as in intensive care units, emergency departments, operating rooms and dialysis clinics, in the presence of multiple monitoring devices as well as in patients undergoing stress testing.

Bioreactance: Changes in aortic blood flow drive phase shifts of propagating waves (detected as frequency changes and independent of amplitude variations). Such changes in frequency correlate well with instantaneous changes in blood volume and blood flow in the aorta. Measurements are received from a selected narrow band.