 Fick principle

The Fick principle infers blood flow from the rate at which a transported substance is added to or removed from blood and the corresponding concentration difference. For whole-body oxygen consumption in a steady state, conservation of mass giveswhere $Q$ is cardiac output, $C_a$ is arterial oxygen content and $C_{\bar{v}}$ is mixed venous oxygen content. The arteriovenous oxygen content difference must match the tissue bed whose oxygen consumption is measured. The equation follows by subtracting outgoing oxygen transport $Q{C}_{\bar{v}}$ from incoming transport $Q{C}_a$; it assumes no continuing accumulation of oxygen within that system.

For a constructed example, oxygen consumption of $250$ mL/min and an arteriovenous oxygen content difference of $5$ mL/dL imply $Q=50$ dL/min, or $5$ L/min. Keeping the decilitre in the denominator prevents a factor-of-ten unit error. Using only a difference of oxygen saturation would omit the hemoglobin concentration needed to obtain oxygen content.

Direct implementation measures oxygen consumption, together with arterial and appropriately mixed venous blood samples. An estimated implementation substitutes a model for oxygen consumption. These are different measurement procedures even though they use the same balance equation. A 2017 comparison explicitly studied thermodilution against estimated-oxygen-uptake output, rather than treating estimated uptake as an exact measured input.^[ref]

At fixed measured content difference, a $20\%$ error in assumed oxygen consumption produces a $20\%$ error in inferred cardiac output. More generally, differentiating the Fick principle gives $\delta Q/Q\simeq \delta {\dot{V}}_{{\mathrm{O}}_2}/{\dot{V}}_{{\mathrm{O}}_2}-\delta (C_a-C_{\bar{v}})/(C_a-C_{\bar{v}})$. Thus a small content difference magnifies a fixed absolute sampling error.