Right Heart and Lung Blood Flow During Exercise (RIGHT-NET 2.0)

The clinical and instrumental assessment of the right heart-pulmonary circulation unit is an essential step in the diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic algorithm of cardiorespiratory diseases. The original RIGHT-NET study demonstrated the relevance of physiological versus pathological responses through evaluation of the TAPSE/sPAP ratio and mPAP/CO slope during exercise stress echocardiography, both of which carry prognostic significance and predict all-cause mortality across healthy subjects, athletes, high-altitude residents, and patients with cardiopulmonary disease. Study objectives include advancing understanding of RH-PCU physiology and pathophysiology during exercise, assessing the discriminative capacity of TAPSE/sPAP and mPAP/CO slope across clinical conditions, investigating associations between RH-PCU functional indices and short-, medium-, and long-term clinical outcomes including all-cause mortality, refining diagnostic and prognostic thresholds in line with the 2022 ESC/ERS guidelines, and building a standardized dataset via REDCap. For each participant, demographic, anthropometric, and clinical characteristics will be collected, together with laboratory tests, invasive and non-invasive diagnostic procedures (including right heart catheterization, cardiac MRI, nuclear diagnostics, and arterial blood gas analysis), therapy data, and clinical outcomes. Data will be analyzed using R (version \>= 4.3.1) with descriptive statistics, group comparisons, univariate and multivariate regression models, and supervised machine learning techniques (random forest, gradient boosting, support vector machine) for predictive modeling. As an observational study, participation does not alter the participant's diagnostic or therapeutic pathway, and no additional insurance coverage beyond standard clinical practice is required.