The international symposia on transcutaneous monitoring have dealt with the interaction between ideas and research, the introduction of unconventional techniques into clinical practice, and the joint efforts of researchers, clinicians, and industry to design and manufacture practical equipment for noninvasive monitoring. The First International Symposium on Continuous Transcutaneous Blood Gas Monitoring took place in Marburg, West Germany, May 31 to June 2, 1978. This was the first major international meeting exclusively devoted to transcutaneous blood gas monitoring, and it was attended by the scientists who had developed this technique or had been working with it, by a large number of doctors, mainly neonatologists who had just begun to use the technique or hoped to do so, and, finally, a rather large number of representatives of industry. The second symposium with the same title, was held in Zurich, Switzerland, October 14-16, 1981.

This time the focus was, to a large extent, on transcutaneous PCQ2 monitoring, for which equipment had become commercially available only a short time before. Fetal monitoring was also discussed at length, as was the use of the transcutaneous techniques in other fields, such as vascular surgery and experimental animal research. The third symposium, October 1-4, 1986, was again held in Zurich. It was entited "Continuous Transcutaneous Monitoring," indicating that not only blood gases but also other parameters could be monitored transcutaneously. Pulse oximetry, which came rapidly into widespread use in the USA and is a technique which has now also become available in Europe, was this time the center of interest. A special session was devoted to comparisons between the transcutaneous PO2 technique and oxygen saturation monitoring with pulse oximeters. An extensive discussing was held on the advantages and disadvantages of these two, partly competitive, techniques.

In order to properly evaluate transcutaneous monitoring, a knowledge of skin circulation is of paramount importance. Therefore, a joint session was held with the Swiss Society of Microcirculation (A. Bollinger, Chairman). The proceeding of the first two international symposia were reported in extenso in two books: Continuous Transcutaneous Blood Gas Monitoring, A Huch, R. Huch, and J.F. Lucey (eds), The National Foundation--March of Dimes, Birth Defects: Original Article Series XV: 4, Alan R. Liss, Inc., New York, 1979.