Detection and Quantification of Neonatal Intraventricular Hemorrhage |
Clinical neonatal monitoring is vital for diagnosis and prognosis of acute brain pathologies. Premature birth accounts for roughly 12 percent of all live births annually in the United States. Despite advances in technologies and treatments in the past decade, the number of severe acute complications for very premature infants accompanied by risks for chronic medical conditions, such as cerebral palsy, have not markedly diminished since the mid-1990s. A majority of these neurodevelopmental problems are associated with damage to the subventricular zone and subsequent intraventricular hemorrhage. Currently, detection of intraventricular hemorrhage is retrospective. Monitoring of premature infants poses unique challenges, one of these being the ideal of non-invasive bedside monitoring. We have previously developed an electrical imaging device (based on Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT)) that uses an EEG-like electrode array to continuously monitor and quantify small (<0.5 ml) blood accumulations in the neonatal ventricles. We propose developing a monitoring device that can simultaneously gather EEG and bleeding status data using the same electrode array, with minimal impact on clinical management. The procedure will be extensively tested in simulations and animal (piglet) models in respect of the quantitative EIT and EEG diagnostic indexes. The overall goal of this project is to develop a novel brain-monitoring device and automatic EEG and EIT data reconstruction algorithms that will allow the bedside clinician to improve the delivery of care to these neonates in real time, thereby mitigating the effects of intraventricular hemorrhages and possibly decreasing the severity of neurodevelopmental deficits.
Publications on the project:
1. Mariano Fernandez-Corazza, Rosalind Sadleir, Sergei Turovets, Don Tucker. MRI piglet head model for EIT and IVH simulation. 17th International Conference on EIT. (Stockholm, Sweden. 19-23 June 2016).
2. Te Tang, Michael Weiss, Peggy Borum, Sergei Turovets, Don Tucker, Rosalind Sadleir. In vivo quantification of intraventricular hemorrhage in a neonatal piglet model using an EEG-layout-based electrical impedance tomography array. Physiological Measurement, 2016. Special Issue on 16th International Conference on Biomedical Applications of Electrical Impedance Tomography (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 2-5 June 2015).
Additional Material free to download:
Scalable piglet model segmentation, surface mesh, and volumetric mesh. The zip file contains MATLAB “.mat” files with the segmentation volumetric image and the meshes. For more information, please read the README file inside the downloadable .zip file.