Published in:
01-07-2004 | Special Article
Year in review in intensive care medicine: 2003. II. Brain injury, hemodynamics, gastrointestinal tract, renal failure, metabolism, trauma, and postoperative
Authors:
Edward Abraham, Peter Andrews, Massimo Antonelli, Laurent Brochard, Christian Brun-Buisson, Geoffrey Dobb, Jean-Yves Fagon, Johan Groeneveld, Jordi Mancebo, Philipp Metnitz, Stefano Nava, Michael Pinsky, Peter Radermacher, Marco Ranieri, Christian Richard, Robert Tasker, Benoit Vallet
Published in:
Intensive Care Medicine
|
Issue 7/2004
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Excerpt
Considerable interest remains in measuring cerebral blood flow and in ascertaining the adequacy of cerebral blood flow, cerebral perfusion pressure, and substrate delivery/metabolism after acute brain injury. Researchers today are dogged by the same problem that faced pioneers many decades ago: that the brain is inaccessible within the skull. The combined technologies of magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, transcranial Doppler ultrasound, near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS), and cerebral microdialysis offer the prospect of better understanding the basic regulatory mechanisms that remain to be elucidated in neurophysiology. Cross-sectional imaging/signals offer the potential for spatial resolution but cannot provide the vigilance desirable in critical care monitoring, and bedside monitors measure either indirect variables or regional variables that may not accurately reflect other brain subregions. What is required is a “bottom-up” modeling exercise, which generates a model of cerebral autoregulation, from cellular metabolism to global cerebral perfusion. …