Website: http://www.fp7brainsafe.com/
Intracranial Pressure (ICP) is a central variable – a vital sign and biomarker – in neurological diagnosing and monitoring. Currently available methods for ICP monitoring have a complex or highly invasive nature. An invasive measurement procedure requires a surgery, taking at least 0.5 hour from physicians’ decision to measure patient’s ICP up to the start of such measurement. Time and quick diagnosis are critical in case of head trauma. Since some brain cells start degrading in the few minutes after traumatic brain injury.
Brainsafe II offers a prototype of non-invasive ICP meter for routine clinical care – an autonomous, rapid, accurate and precise device for measurement of absolute (quantitative) ICP value without the need to calibrate the device for individual patient. Brainsafe II is capable to provide the aICP value less than seven minutes and without the surgery. The benefits of such device are enormous for diagnosing and treatment of traumatic brain injury, stroke, hydrocephalus, etc.
Eesti Innovatsiooni Instituut’s main role was to develop a solution for clutter noise suppression from ultrasonic Doppler signals, helping to shorten the measurement process time and enabling potentially to get more reliable and accurate measurement results in the future. Complex mathematical models and digital signal processing were modelled initially in MATLAB and then optimised for extremely high performance in low-level C programming language and SIMD instructions.
Main achievements of the project are:
- Using a novel approach, clutter noise was reduced dramatically, helping faster measurement of aICP. Arminas Ragauskas: “Such improvement of Signal/clutter ratio has been never demonstrated in the past, according to my knowledge“.
- The optimisation of the clutter noise removal solution – complex algorithms that took 5-7 minutes to calculate in MATLAB were able to run after crafted code optimisation within 5 – 3 seconds on the same computer.
BrainSafe II project’s main aim was to further-develop previous version of Vittamed’s innovative technology for enhanced performance and adding a smart automatic robotic probe in order to eliminate the need for highly qualified personnel, which would otherwise create a bottleneck in the adoption and application of the device.
The Brainsafe II project achieved significant scientific and technological results including the developed enhanced ultrasound Doppler system, optimized signal processing and filtering algorithms, novel pressurization and automatic electromechanical ultrasonic transducer spatial positioning system.
Euronews on Brainsafe technology: