A research team led by the University of Waterloo has created a new monitoring system to save lives and significantly reduce health-care costs in brain-injury cases through the early detection of infections in intensive care units.
“This platform is designed to almost instantly capture trends and identify complications before they become much more serious,” said Dr. Mahla Poudineh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Canada Research Chair in Health Monitoring BioNano Devices at Waterloo.
In the United States alone, about 25,000 hospital patients with traumatic brain injuries and other conditions, including hydrocephalus and brain hemorrhage, require drains to remove excess brain fluid each year.
Up to 20 per cent of those cases result in infections that more than double the duration of hospital stays and lead to complications including severe meningitis, neural damage, disability and death.
Clinicians now try to catch infections by taking samples of brain fluid and sending them to laboratories for analysis, a labour-intensive process that can only be done once every day or two.
The international research team, which includes over a dozen members in Canada, Germany and the U.S., recognized an opportunity to improve patient outcomes and cut costs by continuously monitoring brain fluid for early signs of infection and reduced flow, which can also be a serious problem.
The result is NeuroSense, a monitoring system that connects to drainage lines to detect biomarkers of infection, including changes in glucose, lactate and pH, as well as flow rate, as brain fluid moves through them.
A 3D-printed device about the size of a smartphone contains four sensors connected to an electrochemical analyzer and a display so doctors and nurses can continuously monitor levels right at the bedside.
“The benefits include early warning of infection or drain malfunction, enabling faster, better treatment decisions,” said Fatemeh Keyvani, a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering at Waterloo who led the research.
NeuroSense performed well compared to standard testing in the lab and with a small number of patients in a hospital intensive care unit.
Researchers plan to add an alarm to automatically alert clinicians to problems, conduct larger clinical studies and refine components as they work towards potential commercialization.
In addition to Waterloo, the project involves researchers at University Medicine Rostock, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School.
A paper on the work, A platform for near real-time and multiplexed monitoring of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers and flow in neurocritical care, was recently published in Science Translational Medicine.
Journal
Science Translational Medicine