Validity of Radical 7 Masimo Monitor at Measuring Hemoglobin in Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care

Fifty percent of children that survive a critical illness are anemic at discharge from the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU)(1). Given that there are approximately 9000 PICU admissions/year in Canada, this represents almost 4500 children per year. Anemia is associated with abnormal neurocognitive development in infants and young children. A contributor to PICU anemia is the excessive amount of blood testing and iatrogenic blood losses(2). Non-invasive continuous hemoglobin monitoring (Sp-Hb) have been developed in the medical setting in an attempt to minimize invasive blood testing and reduce blood losses. The Radical 7 Masimo device (Masimo corporation, Irvine, CA) is one of the popular devices used for non-invasive hemoglobin monitoring. Its accuracy has been previously investigated in various populations(3-6). The objective of this study is to investigate the validity of the Radical 7 Masimo device at measuring hemoglobin trends non-invasively in critically ill children.