UCLA Trying to Predict Rising Brain Pressure

The neurosurgery department at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles is testing software to predict increasing brain pressure in patients with traumatic brain injury.


The neurosurgery department at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles is testing software to predict increasing brain pressure in patients with traumatic brain injury.

The project is funded under a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The hospital is using the InfoSphere Streams data analysis software of IBM Corp. integrated with the BedMasterEx bedside monitoring software of Excel Medical Electronics.

Existing bedside alarms alert nurses when intracranial pressure reaches a certain threshold. The goal now is to analyze the pressure data in concert with pulse, blood pressure, heart and respiration data to identify subtle changes in patient status that could signal forthcoming pressure increases in the brain.

The initiative is part of an increasing focus on analytics and Big Data projects for IBM, which recently increased its 2015 revenue target for that area of its business from $16 billion to $20 billion.

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