Development and Clinical Validation of the LymphMonitor Technology to Quantitatively Assess Lymphatic Function

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Development and Clinical Validation of the LymphMonitor Technology to Quantitatively Assess Lymphatic Function
Abstract
Current diagnostic methods for evaluating the functionality of the lymphatic vascular system usually do not provide quantitative data and suffer from many limitations including high costs, complexity, and the need to perform them in hospital settings. In this work, we present a quantitative, simple outpatient technology named LymphMonitor to quantitatively assess lymphatic function. This method is based on the painless injection of the lymphatic-specific near-infrared fluorescent tracer indocyanine green complexed with human serum albumin, using MicronJet600TM microneedles, and monitoring the disappearance of the fluorescence signal at the injection site over time using a portable detection device named LymphMeter. This technology was investigated in 10 patients with unilateral leg or arm lymphedema. After injection of a tracer solution into each limb, the signal was measured over 3 h and the area under the normalized clearance curve was calculated to quantify the lymphatic function. A statistically significant difference in lymphatic clearance in the healthy versus the lymphedema extremities was found, based on the obtained area under curves of the normalized clearance curves. This study provides the first evidence that the LymphMonitor technology has the potential to diagnose and monitor the lymphatic function in patients.
Publication
Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland)
Volume
11
Issue
10
Pages
1873
Date
2021-10-12
Journal Abbr
Diagnostics (Basel)
Language
eng
ISSN
2075-4418
Library Catalog
PubMed
Citation
Polomska, A., Gousopoulos, E., Fehr, D., Bachmann, A., Bonmarin, M., Detmar, M., & Lindenblatt, N. (2021). Development and Clinical Validation of the LymphMonitor Technology to Quantitatively Assess Lymphatic Function. Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland), 11(10), 1873. https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics11101873