Abstract
Premature birth is one of the most important factors increasing the risk for brain damage in newborns. Development of an intraventricular hemorrhage in the immature brain is often triggered by fluctuations of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Therefore, monitoring of CBF becomes an important task in clinical care of preterm infants. Mathematical modeling of CBF can be a complementary tool in addition to diagnostic tools in clinical practice and research. The purpose of the present study is an enhancement of the previously developed mathematical model for CBF by a detailed description of apparent blood viscosity and vessel resistance, accounting for inhomogeneous hematocrit distribution in multiscale blood vessel architectures. The enhanced model is applied to our medical database retrospectively collected from the 254 preterm infants with a gestational age of 23–30 weeks. It is shown that by including clinically measured hematocrit in the mathematical model, apparent blood viscosity, vessel resistance, and hence the CBF are strongly affected. Thus, a statistically significant decrease in hematocrit values observed in the group of preterm infants with intraventricular hemorrhage resulted in a statistically significant increase in calculated CBF values.
Highlights
Due to current knowledge and advances in neonatal care, 90% of preterm infants survive, but up to 50% of very low birth weight infants (< 1500 g) develop some sort of permanent neurological impairment caused by injury to the preterm brain [1]
The variation of apparent blood viscosity depending on vessel diameter is shown in Fig 1a for several values of systemic hematocrit HSYS
For vessels with d > 500 μm the apparent blood viscosity is almost independent on vessel diameter (Fig 1a) and for HSYS = 45% it is close to the constant value μ = 0.003 Pa s, which is usually taken for numerical calculations
Summary
Due to current knowledge and advances in neonatal care, 90% of preterm infants survive, but up to 50% of very low birth weight infants (< 1500 g) develop some sort of permanent neurological impairment caused by injury to the preterm brain [1]. Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) remains the major complication of the premature birth, especially for very preterm infants with less than 32 weeks gestation (WG) [2].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
