Intradialytic techniques for automatic and everyday access monitoring

Vascular access dysfunction is associated with reduced delivery of dialysis, unplanned admissions, patient symptoms, and loss of access, making assessment of vascular access a fundamental part of routine care in dialysis. Clinical trials to predict the risk of access thrombosis based on accepted reference methods of access performance have been disappointing. Reference methods are time-consuming, affect the delivery of dialysis, and therefore cannot repeatedly be used with every dialysis session. There is now a new focus on data continuously and regularly collected with every dialysis treatment, directly or indirectly associated with access function, and without interrupting or affecting the delivered dose of dialysis. This narrative review will focus on techniques that can be used continuously or intermittently during dialysis, taking advantage of methods integrated into the dialysis machine and which do not affect the delivery of dialysis. Examples include extracorporeal blood flow, dynamic line pressures, effective clearance, dose of delivered dialysis, and recirculation which are all routinely measured on most modern dialysis machines. Integrated information collected throughout every dialysis session and analyzed by expert systems and machine learning has the potential to improve the identification of accesses at risk of thrombosis.