WASHINGTON
UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Wireless brain
sensors developed by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine
in St. Louis and
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are smaller than a pencil tip
and
can monitor
intracranial pressure and temperature before being absorbed by the body,
negating the need
for surgery to remove the devices.
(January 18, 2016) Tiny
implants measure intracranial pressure, temperature before being absorbed into
the body
A team of neurosurgeons and engineers has developed wireless
brain sensors that monitor intracranial pressure and temperature and then are
absorbed by the body, negating the need for surgery to remove the devices.
Such implants, developed by scientists at Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis and engineers at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, potentially could be used to monitor patients
with traumatic brain injuries, but the researchers believe they can build
similar absorbable sensors to monitor activity in organ systems throughout the
body. Their findings are published online Jan. 18 in the journal Nature.
“Electronic devices and their biomedical applications are
advancing rapidly,” said co-first author Rory K. J. Murphy, MD, a neurosurgery
resident at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital
in St. Louis. “But a major hurdle has been that implants placed in the body
often trigger an immune response, which can be problematic for patients. The
benefit of these new devices is that they dissolve over time, so you don’t have
something in the body for a long time period, increasing the risk of infection,
chronic inflammation and even erosion through the skin or the organ in which
it’s placed. Plus, using resorbable devices negates the need for surgery to
retrieve them, which further lessens the risk of infection and further
complications.”
Murphy is most interested in monitoring pressure and
temperature in the brains of patients with traumatic brain injury.
About 50,000 people die of such injuries annually in the
United States. When patients with such injuries arrive in the hospital, doctors
must be able to accurately measure intracranial pressure in the brain and
inside the skull because an increase in pressure can lead to further brain
injury, and there is no way to reliably estimate pressure levels from brain
scans or clinical features in patients.