BOSTON, Jan 19, 2004 -- (PR Newswire) -- NeuroSystems,
LLC announced today that it has filed a U.S. patent for a multimodality neuromonitoring
system that provides neurosurgeons and other clinicians the ability to monitor
important higher order, clinically relevant neurophysiological functions by intelligently
blending the data produced by basic neuromonitoring sensors.
While routine neurosurgical monitoring
has historically been largely limited to the measurement of intracranial pressure
(ICP), a rather late stage indicator of the patient's status and probable clinical
outcome, the past decade has seen the introduction of a number of sensor technologies
which permit the monitoring of other important physical and chemical quantities
including cerebral blood flow (CBF), partial pressures of tissue oxygen and carbon
dioxide, pH, temperature, and the concentrations of various metabolites and ions
via microdialysis.
According to NeuroSystems, with the
recent exception of cerebral blood flow, there has been little effort to interrelate
these new data in real-time in clinically meaningful ways. As a result, many potentially
important monitored parameters have to date been underutilized.
For example, while cerebral perfusion
pressure (CPP), ICP and CBF are all important indicators in the clinical setting
of traumatic brain injury, it is only when they are combined to visualize and
quantify intracranial dynamics like cerebral autoregulation and vasoreactivity
that they begin to approach their true clinical potential.
Likewise, the partial pressure of
oxygen can be easily measured, but taken in isolation this data is not nearly
as useful clinically as when it is related to the metabolism of a region of brain
tissue and expressed, for example, as the cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption
(CMRO2).
Commenting on the patent filing,
Rick Cataldo, NeuroSystems' President, said, "This patent filing is an important
milestone for NeuroSystems. We believe that the successful integration of basic
parameters into a multimodality instrument will depend to a great extent on that
instrument's ability to blend interrelated data and interpret these relationships
in clinically relevant ways."
"There is a clear need,"
Cataldo added, "for more intelligent systems which can display derived quantities
and indicators that are clinically relevant and thus more useful to clinicians.
NeuroSystems intends to satisfy that need."
NeuroSystems' mission is to develop
and market intelligent monitoring systems which maximize the clinical value of
basic monitored parameters through real-time calculation, storage and display
of clinically relevant derived parameters and neurophysiologic indicators.
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