A few weeks before the project ends, the VASCOVID Consortium met in the Parc Taulí Hospital for its last general assembly.
The team shared the project’s achievements and each work package leader explained the progress made, summarizing the completed milestones. During the last months, the VASCOVID device has been used by 10 different trained users at the Parc Taulí Hospital. Overall, the clinical studies sum up around 150 hours of measurements, studying and monitoring more than 215 subjects in the ICU, testing four different protocols.
The meeting was celebrated the day before the annual meeting of the Barcelona Medical Photonics Network. Taking the opportunity, Prof. Davide Contini from the Politecnico di Milano introduced the VASCOVID project to the audience and summarized the progress over the last two years, also presenting the outcomes of the clinical studies. There was also a demonstration session where attendees had the opportunity to see the device functioning and ask questions about and ask questions about its functioning.
The BMPN annual meeting explored microcirculation in health and disease
The annual meeting of the Barcelona Medical Photonics Network brought together experts in the field to discuss microcirculation in several clinical areas, including critical care, cancer, stroke, and infant development. Held at the Auditorium of the Parc Taulí Hospital, VASCOVID coordinator Turgut Durduran introduced the event, which was also moderated by clinician Jaume Mesquida, highlighting the collaborative nature of the network and its origins in ICFO’s work with various hospitals in the Barcelona area.
The morning session began with a talk by Prof. Dr. Daniel de Backer, Head of the intensive care department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and CHIREC hospitals. Dr. de Baecker discussed the historical approaches to measuring microcirculatory health in the ICU, stressing the importance of tissue perfusion and the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. He concluded his talk by mentioning the existing limitations of microcirculation monitoring techniques and the parameters of interest.
The session continued exploring the monitoring of microcirculation at the intensive care units, and Dr. Jaume Mesquida discussed the use of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) when weaning from mechanical ventilation. Postdoctoral researcher at ICFO Dr. Lorenzo Cortese presented the results of the HEMOCOVID-19 project, which has studied more than 600 patients using NIRS and vascular occlusion.
Other invited talks presented a project on sublingual microscopy and explored the microcirculation beyond critical care in thyroid cancer, the relevance of microcirculation in stroke, language development in infancy and the study of bilingualism using fNIRS, and the importance of microcirculation and physical activity.
