Abstract

Samples of blood were obtained from newborn infants simultaneously from an umbilical artery catheter, an `arterialized' heel, an unprepared heel, and from an `arterialized' thumb. The correlation between the arterial oxygen tension with that of capillary blood, whether arterialized or not, was poor. Thus it was concluded that arterial blood is the only satisfactory sample for the measurement of oxygen tension in the newborn.