Noninvasive cerebral blood oxygenation monitoring: Clinical test of multiwavelength optoacoustic system

摘要

Continuous monitoring of cerebral blood oxygenation is critically important for treatment of patients with life-threatening conditions like severe brain injury or during cardiac surgery. We designed and built a novel multiwavelength optoacoustic system for noninvasive, continuous, and accurate monitoring of cerebral blood oxygenation. We use an Optical Parametric Oscillator as a light source. We successfully tested the system in vitro as well as in vivo in large animals (sheep) through thick tissues overlying blood vessels which drain venous blood out of the brain (e.g., superior sagittal sinus or jugular vein). Here we present the results of clinical tests of the system for continuous noninvasive cerebral blood oxygenation monitoring in the internal jugular vein of healthy volunteers. We applied our custom-built optoacoustic probe (which incorporated a wide-band acoustic transducer and an optical fiber) to the neck area overlying the internal jugular vein. We performed measurements with volunteers at 18 wavelengths in the near-infrared spectral range. Despite a thick layer of overlying connective tissue and low energy used in the experiments, we recorded signals with high signal-to-noise ratios for all volunteers. We found that the temporal (independent of signal amplitude) parameters of recorded profiles for different levels of blood oxygenation correlated well with the spectrum of effective attenuation coefficients of blood.