Measuring of the heparin leakage into the circulation from central venous catheters--an in vivo study

Abstract

We present a model that enables the measurement of the catheter leakage in vivo. We applied the model on three kinds of catheters and concluded that both early and late leakages are significantly higher in nontunnelled catheters compared to Hemoflow and Ash Split tunnelled catheters. Our results show that the so-called early leakage measured in vivo is significantly lower compared to the results from in vitro studies. Further research is necessary to determine the amount of leakage volume for different kinds of catheters and to determine the exact leakage dynamics of lock solutions in vivo.