Clinical Application of Telemetric Intracranial Pressure Monitoring

Abstract

An implantable intracranial pressure (ICP) sensor for long-term monitoring of epi- or subdural pressures would be very useful. Others have proposed sensor designs, summarized by ZERVAS et al (2). Their major problems have been: drift of calibration; no calibration check in vivo, and non-standardized calibrations. We first proposed a sensor which overcomes these problems by incorporating an internal stop within the sensor, so that the zero-point can be confirmed in vivo (2). We also proposed a pressure-balancing method to determine the pressure calibration of the device in vivo (2). A single-diaphragm version of this sensor is suited for ventricular fluid ICP monitoring (1), and a two-diaphragm version is designed for epidural measurements. Updated clinical results on the latter are described here.