• Anna Schneider, Bernd Minnich, Edda Hofstätter, Christof Weisser, Erna Hattinger-Jürgenssen, and Martin Wald.
• Division for Neonatology, University Hospital for Pediatrics, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria.
• Acta Paediatr. 2014 Sep 1;103(9):934-8.

AimMeasuring cerebral oxygenation using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has taken on an increasingly important role in the field of neonatology. Several companies have already developed commercial devices, and more publications are reporting absolute boundary values or percentiles for neonates. We compared four commercially used devices to discover whether they provided consistent results in the same patients.MethodsWe recruited nine preterm infants and tested them for 2 h, using sensors from two different devices. The measurements were carried out six times on each child, so that all four devices were compared with each other. A total of 54 measurements were conducted. The following devices were compared: the NIRO 200 (Hamamatsu Photonics K.K), the INVOS 5100c (Somanetics), the Fore-Sight (CAS Med.) and the SenSmart X-100 (NONIN).ResultsThe cerebral tissue oxygenation data yielded by the individual devices differed significantly from each other, ranging from a minimum difference of 2.93% to a maximum difference of 12.66%.ConclusionThe commercially available NIRS devices showed highly significant differences in local cerebral tissue oxygenation levels, to the extent that the industry cannot agree on uniform and reproducible standards. Therefore, NIRS should only be used for trend measurements in preterm infants.©2014 Foundation Acta Paediatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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