A device designed to give early warning of a bleed during endovascular procedures has been demonstrated to be safe and accurate in its first test in human patients, a conference has heard.

The Saranas Early Bird Bleed Monitoring System successfully detected bleeding events among 60 patients undergoing transcatheter aortic-valve replacement (TAVR) and other procedures at five centres, the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography Interventions annual meeting in Las Vegas, US, was told in May.

The device, invented at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, US, detected bleeding in 65% of the patients, whose mean age was 76, with almost perfect agreement with post-procedural CT scans, and it caused no complications.

“Among a population of all-comer patients undergoing a broad variety of endovascular procedures, the … monitoring system was safe, easily incorporated in standard flow of work, and demonstrated the capacity to detect bleeding before the progression to a more severe or symptomatic phase,” said principal investigator Dr Philippe Genereux, of Morristown Medical Centre in New Jersey, US.