A noninvasive method for total peripheral resistance baroreflex identification.

We developed a noninvasive method for estimating the static gains of the arterial and cardiopulmonary total peripheral resistance (TPR) baroreflexes. The method involves a system identification analysis of beat-to-beat fluctuations in arterial blood pressure (ABP), cardiac output (CO), and stroke volume (SV) in order to identify two transfer functions relating CO fluctuations to ABP fluctuations and SV fluctuations to ABP fluctuations. The static gains of each of the TPR baroreflexes may then be computed from the static gains of the two identified transfer functions. In order to evaluate the method, we constructed a computer model of the human cardiovascular system. We applied the method to data generated from the computer model and found close agreement between the estimated and actual static gains of the model TPR baroreflexes. We also applied the method to experimental human data and obtained encouraging results. These results motivate the experimental validation of the method.