Photonics Healthcare presents the first patient monitor for oxygen within cells at Euroanaesthesia, the annual conference of the European Society of Anaesthesiology, May 28-30 in London. The COMET measurement system determines oxygen availability and consumption where oxygen is needed: in the tissue cells (rather than in the blood).
The optical measurement relies on the oxygen dependent duration of afterglow of the precursor of heme, a molecule made in active mitochondria. The technology was developed by Egbert Mik, anesthesiologist and intensivist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. The COMET (for Cellular Oxygen METabolism) measures noninvasively at the bedside and was approved as a medical device in Europe in April 2016. Editors of Anesthesiology, the journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, stated: ‘the ability to directly measure tissue oxygenation preferably at the intracellular and mitochondrial level would be a major advance for perioperative medicine’ and ’the authors show that the measurement of cutaneous mitochondrial oxygen tension is feasible and that it may be a promising physiologic trigger to guide transfusion therapy and patient management’.
A video of the use of the COMET is available on Photonics Healthcare’s website.