On April 23, 2014 SickKids 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 (SickKids).
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."
This research was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Banting and Best Doctoral Fellowship, and a Discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
If you would like more information regarding this study please visit this link:
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