22 May New Sick Kids Study Predicts Outcomes for Traumatic Brain Injury
On April 23, 2014 Sick Kids posted an article featuring an outline of a new medical research study that demonstrated a link between the measurement of brain activity and outcomes for traumatic brain injury. This article outlines a newly published study in PLOS ONE from researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids).
The research suggested that a common technology used to detect seizures, electroencephalography (EEG), along with high-speed computer algorithms which measure synchronization of the brain waves from the EEG can be used together to determine the level of traumatic brain injury in a patient. For research this process was used on children who were admitted to the critical care unit preceding a brain injury and in a coma.
According to this study, “normal brain activity measured using this new EEG technique is lively and almost chaotic.” It was found that patients who had a poor outcome had more synchronized electrical brain activity where as those who were classified as having a positive outcome had less synchronized electrical brain activity.
Dr. Jamie Hutchison, senior author of the study and Research Director in Critical Care Medicine at Sick Kids stated;
“This clinical test could be very useful in the prediction of outcome in paediatric patients with brain injury during the acute phase post-injury, our study suggests that this technology may be a new method of real time evaluation of brain function to both monitor brain health and to predict outcome in children in coma.”