Preliminary clinical evaluation of automated analysis of the sublingual microcirculation in the assessment of patients with septic shock: Comparison of automated versus semi-automated software

Issue title: Selected papers of the 36th Conference of the German Society for Clinical Microcirculation and Hemorheology, 5–8. June, 2017, Greifswald, Germany - New developments in clinical microcirculation imaging

Guest editors: M. Jünger, A. Krüger-Genge and F. Jung

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Sharawy, Nivin^{a; b; c} | Mukhtar, Ahmed^a | Islam, Sufia^c | Mahrous, Reham^a | Mohamed, Hassan^a | Ali, Mohamed^a | Hakeem, Amr A.^a | Hossny, Osama^a | Refaa, Amera^a | Saka, Ahmed^a | Cerny, Vladimir^c | Whynot, Sara^c | George, Ronald B.^c | Lehmann, Christian^{c; d; e; *}

Affiliations: [a] Surgical Intensive Care Trauma Center, Department of Anaesthesia, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt | [b] Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt | [c] Department of Anaesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada | [d] Department of Pharmacology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada | [e] Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Correspondence: [*] Correspondence author: Christian Lehmann, MD, PhD, FRCPC, Department of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine, QE II Health Sciences Centre, 10 West Victoria, 1276 South Park St., Halifax, NS, B3H 2Y9, Canada. E-mail: chlehmann@dal.ca.

Abstract: INTRODUCTION:The outcome of patients in septic shock has been shown to be related to changes within the microcirculation. Modern imaging technologies are available to generate high resolution video recordings of the microcirculation in humans. However, evaluation of the microcirculation is not yet implemented in the routine clinical monitoring of critically ill patients. This is mainly due to large amount of time and user interaction required by the current video analysis software. The aim of this study was to validate a newly developed automated method (CCTools®) for microcirculatory analysis of sublingual capillary perfusion in septic patients in comparison to standard semi-automated software (AVA3®). METHODS:204 videos from 47 patients were recorded using incident dark field (IDF) imaging. Total vessel density (TVD), proportion of perfused vessels (PPV), perfused vessel density (PVD), microvascular flow index (MFI) and heterogeneity index (HI) were measured using AVA3® and CCTools®. RESULTS:Significant differences between the numeric results obtained by the two different software packages were observed. The values for TVD, PVD and MFI were statistically related though. CONCLUSION:The automated software technique successes to show septic shock induced microcirculation alterations in near real time. However, we found wide degrees of agreement between AVA3® and CCTools® values due to several technical factors that should be considered in the future studies.

Keywords: Sublingual microcirculation, sepsis, shock, capillary perfusion, incident dark field imaging

DOI: 10.3233/CH-179232

Journal: Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation, vol. 67, no. 3-4, pp. 489-498, 2017