Philips, MIT to research new ways to measure intracranial pressure

Royal Philips is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to research a less invasive method for measuring intracranial pressure (ICP), Philips announced this week.

The combination of Philips’ ultrasound technology and MIT’s physiological modeling could potentially be used on patients who are less critical and would normally not receive that treatment.

The research—expected to last two years—will revolve around testing an algorithm developed by the Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group in MIT’s Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

“The current invasive method of measuring ICP is used only in the sickest patients, but knowledge of ICP is potentially important in a much broader population,” Thomas Heldt, assistant professor in MIT’s department of electrical engineering and computer science and principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. “Our goal is to develop a noninvasive method of measuring ICP that could be used in treating a much wider range of conditions. This project gives us an exciting opportunity to test innovative hardware and modeling techniques at the bedside in real time."

“Today it is very difficult to gauge the level of head trauma someone has sustained at the scene of an incident, because there is no quick and effective way to gauge the pressure inside the skull,” Joseph Frassica, MD, chief science officer of Philips Research North America, said in the same statement. “Through this research, we hope to use the same technology most people associate with the first images of their child, in a way that has the potential to help us to differentiate a concussion from a serious traumatic brain injury and everything in between. Whether you’re a high school football player, in the NFL, a soldier in the battlefield, or unfortunate enough to be injured in an auto accident—we hope that this technology will give first responders a better way to determine if you have a life-threatening brain injury and allow faster and more accurate triage and treatment.”