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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the most severe type of injury in terms of death and lifelong disability. The mainstay of severe TBI management is intracranial pressure (ICP) measurement. Existing gold standard techniques to measure ICP involve placing a sensor into the brain tissue through a small hole drilled in the skull. This non-therapeutic procedure risks infection and bleeding into the brain and can only be performed by a neurosurgeon. Therefore, there is a vital demand to develop non-invasive technologies that allow measuring the ICP. This research has developed a non-invasive, continuous, and optical monitoring system to assess ICP in TBI patients. An in-vitro evaluation of the technology was performed in a head phantom that mimics cerebral anatomy, physiology, and optical tissue properties. The system works by shining light into the brain through the skull. The recorded optical signals (photoplethysmograph) from the phantom’s brain are related to the induced changes in ICP. In this setup, an invasive ICP probe was also used as the reference measurement. The phantom’s pressure was changed between 5 mmHg and 30 mmHg in steps of 5 mmHg. The experiment considered 16 replicates. Advanced algorithms and Machine Learning (ML) models utilising optical signal feature extraction techniques were implemented in translating the optical signals into absolute measurements of ICP. The resultant support vector machine model presented a sensitivity and specificity of 87% ± 10 and 92% ± 13, respectively. This proof of concept study suggests the system’s viability for performing non-invasive estimations of ICP. |
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