Evaluation of Two Handheld Point-of-Care Blood Gas Analyzers in Healthy Donkeys

There has been increasing interest in blood gas analysis in donkeys. "Point-of-care (POC) testing" is a diagnostic testing performed on or immediately next to the patient. This study assesses the agreement between two POC blood gas analyzers in donkeys. Arterial and venous blood samples were collected from 17 donkeys and analyzed using a fully automated blood gas analyzer (ABL 700 Series Radiometer, Denmark) (RAD) and two POC blood gas analyzers (i-STAT System; VetStat, Idexx). The parameters revealed by all three devices were submitted to a canonical discriminant analysis, to evaluate which parameters differentiated the POC analyzers from the RAD. On the basis of the discriminant analysis, we evaluated the best POC for each parameter registered, in comparison with RAD. The results also changed depending on the type of blood (venous or arterial blood). The agreement between i-STAT and RAD was good for venous samples, but was poor for arterial samples. A poor agreement was found between VetStat and RAD for both venous and arterial samples. The increment of the number of subjects might lead to a better understanding of the potential role of the POCs in clinical setting. Finally, increasing the study population is recommended to set reference values.