Completed Heart, Stroke & Blood Brain & Nervous System

Real-time detection of the onset of secondary brain injury in the intensive care unit.

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation Imperial College London
Funding £1.3M
Period Sept 2011 — Nov 2017

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every five minutes in a UK intensive care unit, a bedside monitor will update a new number—the Brain Injury Index—that tells clinicians whether a patient with traumatic brain injury is about to deteriorate. This matters because traumatic brain injury kills or permanently disables more working-age adults than any other condition. In 30% of patients, a delayed secondary brain injury develops unpredictably within five days of the initial trauma, causing death or lasting loss of physical, cognitive, and social function. Currently, clinicians cannot foresee this deterioration, so they cannot prevent it. The research will combine three real-time signals from the injured brain—electrical activity, chemical metabolism, and intracranial pressure—into a single continuously updated index. When the index signals rising risk, it will also identify which physiological mechanism is failing, guiding a targeted change in treatment. If successful, the system could transform intensive care for TBI patients from reactive to predictive, enabling personalised treatment that reduces long-term disability, dependency, and death, while shortening ICU stays. The impact would be felt in every hospital trauma unit that treats head injuries.

View original technical description
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is the most important cause of death and disability in people of working age. It has a complex pathophysiology which evolves over a 5 day period post-injury while the patient is in the Hospital Intensive Care Unit. In 30% of patients this leads to a delayed secondary' brain injury that directly causes death or permanent loss of physical, cognitive and psychosocial function, and presents a major challenge to intensivists and nursing staff. Currently, development of secondary brain injury is unpredictable, hence unpreventable. This project will deliver a new solution: a Brain Injury Index displayed and continuously updated at the bedside. It will alert clinicians to a new risk of secondary injury, and then identify the mechanism requiring a change in treatment. The system will identify evolving pathophysiology using dynamic measurements of different classes of information from the injured brain: local field potential (electrocoticography), chemical indices of metabolism and intracranial pressure signals. On-going use of the instrument's real-time readings at the bed-side allows for continuous personalised treatment for that patient. This new approach to acute injury management control will deliver a step improvement in outcome and reductions in long-term morbidity, dependency, and mortality, together with reduced ICU-stay.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Martyn Boutelle (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Health Innovation Challenge Fund Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.