Ultrasound Evaluation of the Jugular Venous Pulse (US-JVP)

The study will be articulated in different phases, encompassing data collection, development of physical and mathematical models, statistical evaluations, and software implementation. The clinical experimental phase of the study (data collection) will involve hospitalized adult patients requiring a scheduled central venous catheterization and measurement of the CVP as part of their usual care. The latter will be used as the gold standard measure of CVP for the subsequent data processing and analysis. A small sample of healthy adult volunteers will also be recruited only for the non-invasive US evaluation of the JVP. The validation processes will include assessment of the diagnostic power of the US-JVP estimated CVP values and US-JVP waveforms, including evaluation of sensibility, specificity, predictive positive and negative values, accuracy and precision.