Dialysis Access

The expert vascular physicians at Trinity Health Michigan perform dialysis access for the treatment of chronic kidney disease or kidney failure.

What is Dialysis Access?

Your kidneys have several important jobs. In addition to filtering your blood, they help maintain just the right balance of water, acids, and minerals in your body. They also function as part of the endocrine system to produce hormones.

Kidney disease and failure occur when the kidney loses its ability to maintain fluids and filter out harmful toxins. The most common treatment for this is dialysis, a process that removes waste for your kidney. While there are multiple forms of dialysis, the most common is hemodialysis, which is a method of taking blood out of the body and putting it through a filter system to purify it of toxins.

Dialysis access is the process of creating a pathway through the vein for filtering blood out. Our vascular specialists create short-term dialysis access points by inserting a catheter below the skin of the arm or leg to begin hemodialysis.

If you need long-term dialysis, your physician will connect an artery to one of your veins for more permanent access. Occasionally no adequate veins are available and an artificial graft will be used.

The Ellipsys® Vascular Access System

No incisions. No sutures. No scar. The Ellipsys^® Vascular Access System is a minimally invasive procedure that creates a percutaneous arteriovenous (AV) fistula for hemodialysis access in patients with End-Stage Renal Disease.

The system allows physicians to access the proximal radial artery in the forearm to create an AV fistula. Under high frequency ultrasound guidance, the Ellipsys System uses a novel outer access cannula, guidewire and vessel capture construct that creates a connection of the vein to the artery using an intravascular approach.

A select amount of low power thermal energy is used to cut the walls of the vessels and fuse the tissue, creating the in-vivo anastomosis without leaving any foreign material (including stitches) in the resulting AV fistula. The use of thermal energy has been successfully used in other vessel sealing procedures with results equal to or better than traditional methods.

Contact Us

Please call our office for more information about dialysis access or The Ellipsys^® Vascular Access System.