A new way to monitor induced comas
After suffering a traumatic brain injury, patients are often placed in a coma to give the brain time to heal and allow dangerous swelling to dissipate. These comas, which are induced with anesthesia drugs, can last for days. During that time, nurses must closely monitor patients to make sure their brains are at the right level of sedation — a process that MIT’s Emery Brown describes as “totally inefficient.”“Someone has to be constantly coming back and checking on the patient, so that you can hold the brain in a fixed state. Why not build a controller to do that?” says Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, who is also an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and a professor of health sciences and technology at MIT.Brown and colleagues at MGH have now developed a computerized system that can track...