Development of an accurate fluid management system for a pediatric continuous renal replacement therapy device

Acute kidney injury is common in critically ill children, and renal replacement therapies provide a life-saving therapy to a subset of these children. However, there is no Food and Drug Administration-approved device to provide pediatric continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT). Consequently, clinicians adapt approved adult CRRT devices for use in children because of lack of safer alternatives. Complications occur using adult CRRT devices in children because of inaccurate fluid balance (FB) between the volumes of ultrafiltrate (UF) removed and replacement fluid (RF) delivered. We demonstrate the design and validation of a pediatric fluid management system for obtaining accurate instantaneous and cumulative FB. Fluid transport was achieved via multiple novel pulsatile diaphragm pumps. The conservation of volume principle leveraging the physical property of fluid incompressibility along with mechanical coupling via a crankshaft was used for FB. Accuracy testing was conducted in vitro for 8 hour long continuous operation of the coupled UF and RF pumps. The mean cumulative FB error was <1% across filtration flows from 300 to 3000 ml/hour. This approach of FB control in a pediatric-specific CRRT device would represent a significant accuracy improvement over currently used clinical implementations.