An automatic low-volume peritoneal dialysis for infant and child patients

In the recent years, continuous peritoneal dialysis (CPD) had a widespread development in Pediatrics due to the fact it is a simple and safe system for fluid management, however, CPD can cause relevant side effects, such as for example symptomatic fluid retention in patients. Thus, the main criteria capable of minimizing the expected morbility and mortality rate remains, de facto, an open question. In the paucity of clinical data concerning the definition and measures the adequacy of dialysis in children treated by means of CPD, the low-volume technique appears an effective modality of the treatment. Due to: (a) the lack, in the authors' knowledge, of commercially available systems for neonatal and pediatric use and (b) the cumbersome and time-consuming surveillance in the manually supervised low-volume CPD, the development of an automatic delivering system appears of interest. In the present paper we describe: (a) the design criteria of a simple and entirely automatic system that is directly settable by pediatric nephrologists and (b) the outcomes of the metrological tests obtained in the in-vitro trials.