Entry Date:
April 17, 2014

Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group

Principal Investigator Thomas Heldt


The Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group leverages data and models to understand the physiology of the injured brain, to improve diagnoses, and to accelerate treatment decisions for the critically ill.

The overarching objectives of the Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group are to improve diagnoses and accelerate treatment decisions for the critically ill and to understand the physiology of the injured brain.To achieve these objectives, we leverage critical care data and mathematical models derived from physiology, along with signal processing and estimation methods, to extract relevant information from clinical data. The models provide the constraints that allow readily observable data streams (such as waveforms of ECG, arterial blood pressure, cerebral blood flow velocity,  and/or near-infrared transmission through cerebral tissue) to be related to physiological variables and parameters that are unmeasured but more directly reflective of changes in pathological state (quantities such as cardiac output, cardiac contractility and ejection fraction, peripheral resistance, intracranial pressure, and/or cerebral metabolism). The models thereby form the basis for estimation of unmeasured quantities from measured ones, thus enabling a fuller assessment and tracking of patient state, and a more comprehensive description of the underlying physiology. Where no such models can be identified, we rely on machine-learning approaches to guide our exploration of the data. Currently, our main research efforts are aligned along main projects.