#vascular access

"Your Puncture Needle is Invisible on Ultrasound (But Ours Glows Like a Disco Ball)" 💉✨

Let’s be real – trying to hit a deep vein with a standard needle is like playing darts blindfolded. Our echogenic catheter needle is here to:

✔️ Glow brighter than your future – Echogenic coating that actually works ✔️ Lock itself before you forget – One-click safety that doesn’t require a PhD ✔️ Flow like your favorite caffeine IV – Ultra-thin walls for max delivery

Swipe for: 1️⃣ A satisfying GIF of the needle glowing under ultrasound (no filters, we promise) 2️⃣ The "Needle Evolution" meme (1850s sewing needle → 2000s wand → OUR GLOW STICK) 3️⃣ Our engineer’s dramatic sketch titled "When the Vein Rolls"

Reblog if you’ve ever:

Called a vessel "the one that got away"

Used ultrasound gel like it’s holy water

Faked confidence while mentally praying

What is PDI Health?

PDI Health, also known as Preventive Diagnostics, is a company that focuses on keeping people healthy before they get sick. They offer tests and check-ups that help find health issues early, so they can be treated more easily. Their services include screenings for various health conditions and personalized health advice.

Why is it Important?

Getting regular check-ups can help catch problems early, often before you even notice symptoms. This can lead to better health outcomes and avoid serious issues later on. PDI Health makes it easier to stay on top of your health with their preventive services.

How Can You Use Their Services?

You can contact PDI Health to schedule a screening or health check-up. They provide information and support to help you understand your health and take proactive steps to maintain it.

Why is Preventive Health Important?

Regular check-ups and screenings are crucial because they can detect health problems before symptoms appear. Early detection allows for timely intervention, which can prevent more serious health issues in the future. PDI Health provides these services to help you stay on top of your health and prevent potential issues.

Services Offered:

Historically, silver ions (Ag-ions) have been used in burns and wound treatments; and food and water preservation by Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians for their antimicrobial properties. The silver atom transforms into a silver cation (Ag+) when it loses one or more electrons and attains a highly reactive state. The Ag+ easily binds to the tissue proteins of microbes, causing vital structural changes that help prevent infections.

Ag-ion antimicrobial technology is a highly versatile, patented, and innovative technology of incorporating silver ions into coatings, textiles, and polymers in a multitude of applications for controlling infections by checking colonisations, and providing sterilization against most microbes including bacteria, fungi, and viruses.

Modern surgical methods, changing patient needs and the emergence of minimally invasive procedures have led to an increase in outpatient treatments. Due to this demand, analgesia and anesthesia therapies have also improved.

Today, anesthesia makes it possible to undergo the most complex procedures in intensive care units that last for hours to minor surgeries in OPD setups. Almost anyone can receive anesthesia, from premature babies to frail elderly patients. Today, anesthesia is considered safe, versatile and indispensable for patient care. Let’s review various types of anesthesia and their limitations:

1. General Anesthesia

In this procedure, the whole body is anesthetized to induce a coma-like state of unconsciousness. The most common application of general anaesthesia is during major surgeries such as heart surgery, knee replacements, and cancer treatment when it is safer and more comfortable for the patient to remain unconscious. While it provides comfort to the patient and surgeon, general anaesthesia helps to relieve muscular tension.

Due to the usage of high dosages of anaesthetic, this procedure poses the risk of inhalation of gastric contents. The process remains long, intricate, and expensive with some common side effects like nausea, vomiting and sore throat due to intubation.

2. Regional Anesthesia

The term regional anesthesia refers to numbing a region or portion of the body (limited area) with a local anesthetic that is injected near the nerves leading to that area. Regional anesthesia can be further classified as follows:

2.1. Spinal Anesthesia

In this type of anesthesia, a small dose of the drug is injected with a needle directly into the fluid surrounding the spinal cord, inside the subarachnoid space (lumbar spine). It effectively blocks motor and sensory functions and causes rapid numbing action in the lower half of the patient. Spinal anesthesia is therefore commonly used in suegeries below umbilical region, which includes the pelvis, lower abdomen and lower extremities.

With increasing cancer incidences worldwide, the need for an efficient, comfortable, and less intensive long-term treatment method rises. This is where a chemo port comes to the rescue of both the clinician and the patient – the patient by saving them the pain and discomfort from several jabs, risk of infections and skin irritations, and the clinician by saving them the time needed to prepare the area before pricking a new needle into the skin every time.

1 in 9 Indians will develop cancer during their lifetime (0-74 yrs of age). Cancer Statistics 2020: Report from National Cancer Registry Programmer, India

What is an Implantable Port and who needs one? A chemo port also called an implantable port, is a totally implantable venous access device, wherein a catheter is linked to a port body and placed subcutaneously in the patient, allowing permanent central venous access for delivering long-term intravenous therapy, usually more than 3 months, like chemotherapy, antibiotics, parenteral nutrition, pain management, fluids, and blood sampling.

Ports are indicated in cases usually requiring central venous access for more than 3 months, when vesicant drugs, drugs with osmolarity > 600 mOsm/L (INS 2006) or 500 mOsm/L, parenteral nutrition with osmolarity > 800 mOsm, or drugs with pH > 9 or pH < 5 need to be administered. [1]

Although not all chemo patients get ports inserted, it is often requested by some because they allow more normalcy in their everyday lives by increasing the aesthetic appearance and requiring limited maintenance. For instance, the patients can swim, sleep on their stomachs, or take a shower hassle-free with a port in (assuming that the surgery is performed right). It is the best option for patients that have poor venous access and when administering certain chemotherapy drugs that are too caustic to be delivered into the peripheral vein.

Where are Implantable Ports placed? The implantable port should sit snugly in the junction between the superior vena cava and the right atrium of the heart. Naturally, the most preferred insertion pathway is the venous access routes, superior vena cava in particular, through the jugular vein, subclavian vein, axillary vein, or cephalic vein. In cases where the superior vena cava is inaccessible, the inferior vena cava is used through the femoral vein.

What are the Implantable Port Indications and Contraindications?

What is Vygon’s take on this? As vascular access experts, Vygon works closely with clinicians and patients to provide products that combine the ideal dwell time with ease of use, effectiveness, and value for money. Vygon’s range of ports is specifically designed as a one-stop central venous access device for both pediatric and adults with a great focus on patient comfort while delivering secure, long-term intermittent IV therapy.

Vygon’s Hybrid implantable port, Polysite, is a hybrid combination of titanium and polyoxymethylene (POM) that are large and lightweight prove to be much much safer than other full plastic ports in the market as the risk of particulate formation from the Huber needle scratching the Titanium reservoir base is negligible. It has a titanium reservoir with a residual volume <1ml and an extremely smooth surface that ensures less dead space for infections.

When aesthetics and patient comfort are of the utmost importance to the patients, Vygon’s low-profile full titanium port Sitimplant and hybrid ports are the ideal go-to options. Sitimplant has a round base for better stability and durability. Vygon’s range of ports has wide applicability from adult to pediatric patients having both high and/or normal BMI. Adding to their benefits, they are MRI-compatible** and CT-compatible. **tests realized according to ASTM F 2052-06e1 standard

Owing to its ergonomic shape, the ports have high ease of insertion into the skin pocket and the Silicone septum can be easily located by palpation. All Vygon ports are available with a variety of insertion kit accessories, including 22G Huber needle, to ensure the right placement is achieved at the very first time using any preferred technique. Both Polysite and Sitimplant come with an extensive range of Silicone and PUR catheters of different gauges that may be preconnected or not, using a radioopaque connection ring.

Surfactant is a substance that reduces the surface tension at the interfaces of two liquids, between a gas and a liquid or between a liquid and a solid. Detergents, soaps, paints, adhesives, motor oils, etc are all examples of commonly used surfactants in daily life. Now, another such lesser talked about surfactant is the one naturally occurring in the alveoli of human lungs – pulmonary surfactant, preventing alveoli from collapsing.

The respiratory system is the system that tirelessly works to help us breathe, comprising an integrated network of lungs, bronchi, bronchioles, pharynx, larynx, nose, and mouth.

The basic fundamental unit of the respiratory system is the alveoli, where the main exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place between the lungs and the blood. The alveoli are tiny, hollow cup-shaped air sacs making up the entirety of the lungs, having very thin walls surrounded by many blood capillaries.

The mean total number of alveoli in an adult human being is 480million located at the end of the bronchioles. [2]

Now, these alveolar walls have a thin layer of water lining their inner surfaces which are formed when water vapor condenses during gas exchange while breathing and this water film creates a strong force at their surface, called surface tension; an intrinsic property of the water molecules to pull each other together to form a sphere (as water tends to form drops). So, it would naturally lead to collapsing of the alveoli into a sphere, ultimately causing problems in breathing.

According to Laplace’s Law, the pressure that facilitates the lungs’ collapse is directly proportional to surface tension and inversely proportional to the alveolar radius.

[P = 2T/r]

where P = pressure on alveolus, T = surface tension, r = alveolar radius

This implies the smaller the radius the higher will be the collapsing pressure and vice-versa; and as alveoli are small in radius to promote a higher surface area to volume ratio in the lungs, they would have a much higher collapsing pressure.

To counteract this high surface tension, our body provides an easy fix. The alveolar type II cells of the lungs secrete a phospholipoprotein fluid, pulmonary surfactant, that lowers the surface tension at this air-water interface and keeps the alveoli wide open to allow efficient breathing, whilst maintaining the structural integrity of alveoli.

Role of pulmonary surfactant

Reduces collapsing pressure of alveoli, and ultimately the lungs

Provides high compliance to allow the lungs to expand and extend to accommodate more air

Regulates the sizes of different alveoli providing stability

Provides immune protection from infectious agents like bacteria, etc

Surfactant Production and Consequent Complications in Neonate

Fetal lung development starts from the 3rd -17th week of gestation and continues 1 – 3 years postnatally. The surfactant production first begins and is detectable in the amino fluid between the weeks 25 – 36 (until birth) [3] [4]

However, usually before 32 weeks of gestation, the fetal lungs are immature and underdeveloped and birth before this progressively increases the chances of respiratory

difficulties due to lack of surfactant and respiratory alveoli. [4] Therefore, preterm infants are at a greater risk of developing morbidities, the most common being Neonatal Respiratory Distress Syndrome, which can lead to hypoxia and other serious complications.

In Europe, RDS is observed for about 90% of babies born at 24wks of gestation and for 80% of babies born at 28wks of gestation.

[5]