Safety, Effectiveness, and 30-Day Follow-up of Electrocautery Biopsy Tract Closure: Retrospective Multicenter Study

To evaluate the safety and technical feasibility of a novel percutaneous biopsy tract electrocautery device.

In total, 120 consecutive patients undergoing tract closure with electrocautery (SinglePass Kronos, SinglePass, Lake Forest, California) following percutaneous solid organ and/or mass coaxial core needle biopsy (CCNB) were included. Outcomes included procedure time, observation time, adverse events, required treatments, and mortality. Preprocedural and postprocedural hematologic parameters were compared in a 65-patient subset.

Patients were aged 62.0 years (SD ± 17.9), with 49.2% men and 50.8% women and target organs including the liver (74; 61.7%), kidney (28; 23.3%), abdomen/mesentery (10; 8.3%), lung (5; 4.2%), and other (3; 2.5%). The most common indications included liver mass (38; 31.7%), medical liver disease (33; 27.5%), and medical renal disease (25; 20.8%). Antithrombotic medications (21; 17.5%) were held per Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) guidelines. Ultrasound (US)- (52.5%) or computed tomography (CT)-guided (47.5%) procedures were completed in 17 minutes (SD ± 8), with outpatients discharged 2.8 hours (SD ± 1.2) postprocedurally. There were no serious adverse events, and 4 small intraprocedural hematomas did not progress following electrocautery. Through 30-days of follow-up, there were no instances of bleeding, transfusions, interventions, surgeries, or need for bleeding-related readmission or clinical encounter. There were no instances of significant hemoglobin drop (>1.5 g/dL) in the 65-patient subgroup, and no immediate or delayed procedure-related deaths; 5 patients expired in hospice.

Use of the SinglePass electrocautery device demonstrated the technical feasibility of CCNB tract closure with no major adverse events, including no major bleeding or procedure-related deaths.