Microcomputer assistance in clinical monitoring of intracranial pressure

Intracranial-pressure (i.c.p.) monitoring has been shown to provide valuable information in the care of patients suffering acute head injury. Continuous recording of i.c.p. is essential due to the rapidly changing characteristics that are encountered, but this produces an overwhelming quantity of data when performed for several days. Methods of data reduction are therefore desirable to aid identification of significant features, and may even reveal aspects of the i.c.p. which are not apparent from the raw data. This paper describes a bedside microcomputer-based monitoring system which automatically acquires i.c.p. data, and periodically compresses them into histograms of pressure. The histograms are displayed to the nursing staff. The microcomputer forms one limb of a distributed computer network which centralises major computing resources on a minicomputer. Both primary and processed i.c.p. data are transmitted to the minicomputer for storage and offline investigation.