Optical sensor to offer non-invasive monitoring of intracranial pressure
An optical probe could allow doctors to continuously measure intracranial pressure (ICP) in trauma victims using a non-invasive method.
Dr Justin Phillips has been awarded £46,000 through a Royal Academy of Engineering and Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship so he can develop the device.
The money will allow him to undertake research for a year from September, by paying for a lecturer to cover his teaching and admin work at City University London.
“This is an optical sensor so it will work on infrared light,” said Phillips, a senior lecturer in biomedical engineering at the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering.
“The skull is fairly transparent to infrared, so the light passes through the skin and the bone and penetrates the brain tissue. The arteries in the brain are pulsating just like the arteries everywhere else.
“The probe detects some reflected light, and the light is reflected from the brain tissue and it is modulated by the pulse, so as the arteries pull an entry in time with the heartbeat they absorb a differing amount of light and you can record a pulse signal.
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