Evaluation of a new handheld point-of-care blood gas analyser using 100 equine blood samples

Verification of the Heska Element Point‐of‐Care blood gas instrument for use with venous blood from alpacas and llamas, with determination of reference intervals

“…It is unclear whether the greater level 1 and level 2 p O 2 imprecision is related to specimen instability (varying degrees of gas exchange was seen upon vial opening in the QCMs having the lowest starting p O 2 ) or true instrument analytical variation, or both. Precision results for the EPOC shown here are similar to those previously reported for equine and canine whole blood …”

“…The value of the New World camelid species (alpacas [ Vicugna pacos ] and llamas [ Lama glama ]) as production and companion animals has increased in the last 2 decades, and these may represent a significant portion of the large animal caseload in some veterinary hospitals. The Heska Element POC (EPOC) rapid blood analyzer (Heska Corporation, Loveland, CO, USA) is a handheld point‐of‐care instrument validated for use in dogs, cats, and horses; however, validation and RIs for camelid species have not been reported. Anecdotally, University of Tennessee Veterinary Medical Center (UTVMC) clinicians have perceived differences in EPOC results from those of the chemistry analyzers in the clinical pathology laboratory for alpacas, llamas, goats, pigs, and horses.…”

Comparison of Enterprise Point‐of‐Care and Nova Biomedical Critical Care Xpress analyzers for determination of arterialpH, blood gas, and electrolyte values in canine and equine blood

“…In the precision study, using the canine blood presented here, precision goals (CV%) were met for both the EPOC and Nova CCX for HCT, pH, PaO 2 , and PaCO 2 . As in our study, other investigators, using canine and equine blood, demonstrated that precision goals were met for pH and PaO 2 . Although authors of both studies reported that PaCO 2 CV% precision was poor because target CV% goals were not met, the PaCO 2 CV% in those studies was similar to the values in our study.…”

“…We chose a range that included both minimum and desirable biological variations while only desirable biological variations were used in the other studies. In addition, HCT CV% was higher than the quality goal CV% from human blood in both of these studies as well as our study reported here. It has been suggested that the variation of CV% for HCT could be related to species‐specific properties of blood .…”

“…To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no published study using canine blood and only one published study using equine blood comparing blood gas and electrolyte values obtained by the EPOC with those obtained by a central bench‐top laboratory analyzer. The study using equine blood showed poor agreement between the EPOC and the Radiometer ABL 77 (Radiometer America, Brea, CA, USA) for a number of analytes . But in a study using human blood, results of the EPOC more closely agreed with those of the Nova CCX, which was the central laboratory analyzer used in this study.…”