[Monitoring of blood coagulation in perioperative care]

Coagulation disorders often occur perioperatively and monitoring of blood coagulation should be fast and adequate to treat these disorders to protect patients from massive bleeding. Control of hemostasis is one of the main issues in major surgeries. Coagulation test results from a central laboratory may delay making such a perioperative decision. Recently, point-of-care monitoring (POCM), which is able to examine coagulation disorder in an operation theater with short waiting time, has become important. Both prothrombin time (PT) and activated clotting time (ACT) are very useful and popular, but also criticized because they can be monitored only until fibrin formation. On the other hand, viscoelastic monitorings of whole blood, are able to estimate fibrin formation, clot fixation, platelet function and fibrinolysis. In this review article, among variable perioperative POCMs of blood coagulation, three thromboelastographic monitorings, such as TEG ROTEM, and Sonoclot as well as PT and ACT, are described along with their utilities and limits to examine perioperative coagulation.