During the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have set up a clinical campaign in ten hospitals worldwide to assess the endothelial health of COVID-19 patients using commercial continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (CW-NIRS) devices (PortaMon, Artinis, NL). In spite of the wide range of clinical applications, the reliability of common CW-NIRS systems for absolute oxygenation measurements was often questioned, opening issues of standardization. In addition, a multi-center trial itself opens issues about how to compare measurements performed by different operators, in different conditions and longitudinally over more than a year. Here, we present how we address these challenges by characterizing and comparing the performance of the devices, with phantom and in vivo experiments.
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