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

Abstract

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.