Cardiac Anesthesia

Supraventricular arrhythmias complicate more than 40% of cardiac surgeries and are associated with an increased risk of bleeding, stroke, heart failure, and death. Preventing the occurrence of these arrhythmias is a major challenge. This study aims to investigate risk factors and protective factors regarding atrial fibrillation and other iatrogenic cardiac arrhythmias after cardiac surgery, particularly innovative anesthetic strategies such as stellar ganglion blockade which have been recently implemented in our center.

Myocardial strain analysis provides additional and valuable information about left ventricular function, particularly in the perioperative setting with its dynamic changes in ventricular load conditions. This allows for earlier risk assessment and, if necessary, the initiation of faster and more targeted therapy. Unfortunately, conventional strain analysis using conventional methods currently takes approximately 5 minutes. However, this amount of time is often not available in a dynamically changing intraoperative setting during cardiac surgery. Therefore, the benefits of strain analysis have not yet been routinely utilized during the intraoperative course. However, new software solutions exist that can perform strain analysis fully automatically and reduce the examination time to a few seconds. However, it remains unclear whether these fully automated analyses also function reliably intraoperatively using transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). The aim of this study is to assess the reliability of these new methods.