Warming of blood and intravenous fluids using low-power infra-red light-emitting diodes

Abstract

Non-contact warming of blood and intravenous (IV) fluids with temperature drop compensation is an unmet clinical need till now, for management of hypothermia in patients with urgent requirement of blood. Currently available technologies provide wet warming or dry warming with direct contact using hot water or with a hot plate, respectively. These conventional technologies need disposable cartridges to be used in conjunction with the warmer. The warmed fluids lose their temperature when passing through long IV lines and fails in its purpose at low flow rates. In this paper, a distributed non-contact warming method is introduced using infra-red radiations. The method incorporates a bag warming unit and an inline cartridge unit. Bag warming unit provides uniform distribution of infra-red thermal energy liberated from low cost infra-red light emitting diodes (IR LEDs) in horizontal and vertical planes of the fluid carrying bag. An inline cartridge, through which the IV line passes, reduces the drop in temperature just before the transfusion site using a cluster of IR LEDs. As per the In Vitro tests are carried out in to establish the safety and efficacy, the bag warming unit steadily rises the temperature to attain the cut off value with a temperature rise coefficient of 0.7 °C/min and the inline cartridge warms the fluid within 10 min at a thermal transfer rate of more than 1.5 °C/min. The fluid temperature is uniformly distributed within a narrow range of 36–38 °C. When the inline warmer is powered on, the drop-in temperature is reduced to zero for flow up to 5 ml/min. For flow rates more than 8 ml/min, the temperature drop is reduced more than half. For massive transfusion range, the temperature of the fluid remains within 38.5 ± 1.2 °C for flow rates in the range of 100–1500 ml/min.

Keywords:

• Blood warmers
• in line warming
• infra-red warming
• hypothermia
• massive fluid transfusion
• slow transfusion
• exchange transfusion

Subject classification codes:

• biomedical engineering

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the staff of Division of Extracorporeal Device of Department of Medical Devices Engineering for their support in developing and testing the method described in the paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interests.