Noninvasive Optical Monitoring of Cerebral Blood Flow and EEG Spectral Responses after Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Case Report

Survivors of severe brain injury may require care in a neurointensive care unit (neuro-ICU), where the brain is vulnerable to secondary brain injury. Thus, there is a need for noninvasive, bedside, continuous cerebral blood flow monitoring approaches in the neuro-ICU. Our goal is to address this need through combined measurements of EEG and functional optical spectroscopy (EEG-Optical) instrumentation and analysis to provide a complementary fusion of data about brain activity and function. We utilized the diffuse correlation spectroscopy method for assessing cerebral blood flow at the neuro-ICU in a patient with traumatic brain injury. The present case demonstrates the feasibility of continuous recording of noninvasive cerebral blood flow transients that correlated well with the gold-standard invasive measurements and with the frequency content changes in the EEG data.