A new monitoring system developed at Waterloo Engineering could save lives and significantly reduce health-care costs by quickly detecting infections in brain-injury cases in intensive care units.
About 25,000 hospital patients in the United States alone each year require drains to remove excess brain fluid due to traumatic brain injuries and other conditions, including hydrocephalus and brain hemorrhage.
Up to 20 per cent of those cases result in infections, more than doubling the duration of hospital stays and leading to complications including severe meningitis, neural damage, disability and death.
“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.
Currently, clinicians 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.
NeuroSense, the continuous monitoring system developed by an international research team led by Waterloo, 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.
“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 who led the research.
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