Shortly after the COVID-19 virus began its lightening spread around the globe in February, 2020, Transonic Surgical Marketing Manager Tim Callahan was contacted by Transonic’s longtime Italian distributor Iatrotek srl saying that the University Hospital in Padua wanted to purchase an ELSA Monitor in order to optimize their extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy (ECMO) for persons suffering severe respiratory distress.
The sale was initiated by Chief Professor Gino Gerosa, President of the Italian Society of 
Cardiovascular Surgery (SICCH) and Professor Federico Rea of the Cardiothoracic/Transplant Department of the University Hospital. The ELSA sale for this emergency was expedited by both Iatrotek srl and Transonic which delivered a monitor to the enduser in record time.
Now in the hands of the hospital’s dedicated and capable perfusionist team led by Dott. Fabio Zanella, the ELSA will help treat ECMO patients by noninvasively detecting and quantifying recirculation to help ensure oxygen delivery. Recirculation identification provides feedback on cannula(s) placement, fluid status and cardiac function. In addition, clot volume within the oxygenator can be quantified and trended by the ELSA Monitor for all ECMO patients. These quantitative measurements eliminate the use of subjective parameters from the bedside and help guide intensive care staff to ensure the best intervention practices. In short, the ELSA Monitor provides the clinician with a quantitative measurement tool to optimize ECMO therapy in all ECMO patients.
Padua, a city of 210,000 population, located in the Veneto province, is one of the three regions in northern Italy that are designated red zones for COVID-19. The three regions are Lombardy (Milan); Veneto (Venice) and Emilia Romagna (Bologna). These are the regions where the disease caught a strangle hold in the middle of February and where they are experiencing the highest number of persons testing positive, deaths from the disease and restrictions. To date, Italy has the third highest number of cases of COVID-19 after the US and China, numbering at the end of March over 80,000, along with over eight thousand deaths.
University Hospital of Padua is one of the top hospitals in Italy. Since the early fifteenth century, the hospital has been associated with the city’s renown University of Padua, established in 1222 and one of the most ancient medical schools in Europe. The famous astronomer, physicist and engineer Galileo Galilei was named Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua in 1592. Now managed by the National Healthcare Trust, the University Hospital combines healthcare, teaching and research. In recent years, Venice-based Iatrotek srl, a medical device distributor, has been instrumental in providing various departments of the hospital, especially neurosurgery, with the benefits of Transonic flow measurement capabilities.
