Non-invasive intracranial pressure measurement using transcranial doppler sonography and support vector machines

Abstract

Current techniques used for intracranial pressure (ICP) measurement are invasive. All require a surgical procedure for placement of a pressure catheter in the central nervous system (CNS) and therefore are associated with risk and morbidity. In this study we propose a noninvasive method for ICP measurement based on signal processing techniques.. In this method a non-linear relationship is used to determine ICP based on two more accessible parameters, namely arterial blood pressure (ABP) and the blood velocity of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) measured using the transcranial doppler (TCD) device. The clinical investigation of the proposed method shows high similarity between the invasively recorded intracranial pressure (ICP) and the predicted ICP using our proposed method under intensive care unit (ICU) conditions. A correlation of r=0.976 was achieved between the predicted ICP and the invasively ICP measurements, which shows a highly sensitive procedure in noninvasive ICP measurement.