Researchers have discovered a new, non-invasive way to measure blood flow to the brain of newborns at the bedside. The method has the potential to enhance diagnosis and treatment across medicine, a Michigan Medicine study suggests.
As the fetus develops, the baby’s lungs fill with fluid and receive oxygen directly from the placenta. This oxygenated blood bypasses the lungs and reaches the rest of the body through a blood vessel called the ductus arteriosus.
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After birth, babies use their lungs to breathe, and the ductus arteriosus usually closes within a few days. However, in about 65% of preterm infants, the blood vessels do not close. The condition, called patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), diverts blood flow to abnormal paths, straining the heart, congesting the lungs, and can steal blood and oxygen from the brain and other organs in newborns. I have.
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Physicians must decide whether to close the PDA with drugs or with an implanted device, both of which carry risks. Accurately measuring blood flow to neonatal organs can help make this important decision. But a problem arises. There is no true blood flow measurement that can actually be used clinically. Jonathan Rubin, MD,doctorateEmeritus Professor of Radiology, University of Michigan School of Medicine.
“This decision as to whether to close the patent ductus arteriosus has been an issue in neonatology for at least 30 years,” said Rubin. “The debate about how blood flow changed, complicated by a history of unreliable data, has really stalled. That’s why measuring blood flow is so important.”
To address this problem, Rubin and a team of Michigan Medicine researchers developed a real-time ultrasound color flow technique that utilizes 3D sampling to measure blood flow. They tested the method on his 10 healthy term infants and obtained total cerebral blood flow measurements that were broadly consistent with using more invasive or technically demanding techniques.Result is Ultrasound in medicine and biology.
“Our method allows you to scan a baby in a parent’s arms without pain or danger. No one has been able to do that before.
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“There are other ways to measure blood flow, but they are cumbersome and often require the baby to be sedated or restrained in a scanner and given an intravenous contrast agent. , preterm infants are in incubators.They are fragile and these techniques can be dangerous.This ultrasound technology can be routinely used in the neonatal intensive care unit and has implications for outcomes for preterm infants with this condition. It can have a big impact.”
Usage
There are many surrogates that are used instead of true blood flow, such as blood flow velocity. But to know the true blood flow, we need to know the velocity of the blood relative to the area it covers.
Just like traffic, knowing how fast cars are going is useless if you don’t know how many cars are on the road, says Rubin.
