Masimo Corporation announced the findings of an abstract presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Technology in Anesthesia (STA) in Miami, Florida. In the study, researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine evaluated the potential clinical utility of Masimo Oxygen Reserve Index as an early warning of impending arterial hemoglobin desaturation in obese patients. This is the first published research investigating the utility of ORi in this particular population group. ORi is a relative indicator of a patient's oxygen reserve in the moderate hyperoxic region (partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood [PaO2] in the range of 100 to 200 mmHg). As an index parameter with a unit-less scale between 0 and 1, ORi can be trended and has optional alarms to notify clinicians of changes in a patient's oxygen reserve. the prospective, observational study, Dr. Ayala and colleagues analyzed data from 36 adult patients with BMI between 30 and 40 kg/m2 who were scheduled for elective surgical procedures requiring general anesthesia and endotracheal intubation. The patients ORi values were measured using a Masimo Root Patient Monitoring and Connectivity Platform with Radical-7 Pulse CO-Oximeter. The researchers recorded the time elapsed from the start of ORi alarming (triggered by decrease in the absolute value and rate of change in ORi) to 98% oxygen saturation, and considered this interval to be the average increase in warning time provided by ORi. The researchers found that among the patients, the average time from the start of ORi alarming to 98% oxygen saturation was 42 ± 49 seconds (ranging from 5 to 255 seconds). Excluding two outliers, the average increase in warning time provided by ORi was 33± 23 seconds (ranging from 5 to 107 seconds).