Non-invasive thermal measurements during newborn’s therapeutic hypothermia and processing of their results

Abstract

This paper focuses on the heat transfer processes occurring during the treatment of neonates suffering from hypoxic-ischemic. This is a type of brain dysfunction (brain injury) that happens (mainly during delivery) when the brain experiences a decrease in blood flow (because of abnormal blood circulation) and in consequence, a decrease in oxygen. It frequently results in an increase in brain temperature to the danger level and hypoxia in some other organs. Treatment requires a specialized cooling device to decrease the temperature of the neonate’s body and particularly the brain temperature. One of the cooling methods is so-called “selective brain cooling”, which consists of direct cooling of the head by a cooling cap. In this work results of non-invasive measurements for 11 patients suffering from hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy and treated at the University Clinical Hospital in Opole, Poland. Collected data were processed in a novel way to formulate a whole series of cumulative energy balances for all patients. It is found that cumulative balancing allows one to determine the metabolic heat rate and results in a more stable history of the therapy than balancing step by step.