Neurological Research

Neurological Innovation Begins with Research

When it comes to heart and brain resuscitation after cardiac arrest, the leadership of University Hospitals goes back more than a century. UH has helped develop resuscitation techniques that have had a significant impact on neurological health, since successful cardiac resuscitation can prevent brain damage due to a lack of oxygen.

George Crile, MD, Chief of Surgery at Western Reserve University, was the first to successfully use external chest compression in 1903 and the first to use adrenaline (epinephrine) in resuscitation in 1909. Claude Beck, MD, professor of cardiothoracic surgery, performed the first successful human cardiac defibrillation in 1947. Dr. Beck also introduced the first cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) course for the lay public in 1958.

That tradition of innovation continues today with research and discovery at University Hospitals Neurological Institute’s Neurocritical Care Center.

Case Critical Care Bioinformatics Project

The ICU of the Future: Translating Data into Bedside Action

The problem: Too much data, not enough information.

• Data overload: In today’s ICU, there are staggering amounts of data, beyond the capability of any person to absorb, integrate and act upon reliably.
• Lack of processing: Basic statistical analyses are elusive. More sophisticated analyses and correlations are unavailable at the bedside.
• Lack of integration and synchronization: Device interoperability is limited.

The solution: The Integrated Medical Environment™ (tiME™)

• Synchronize, integrate and process medical data from all sources
• Based on an open middleware architecture
• Facilitate device interoperability (“plug and play”)
• Allow clinicians to index, search and assemble data
• Present all information in readily interpretable form

Case Critical Care Bioinformatics Consortium

Established in 2007, the Case Critical Care Bioinformatics Consortium is a tight collaboration between physicians, engineers and scientists focusing on integrating data acquisition across all devices in the ICU, transforming data to actionable information through signal processing, and providing clinical decision-support through innovative visualization at the bedside.

Our mission has been is to provide a forum for multidisciplinary collaboration between the computational sciences and critical care medicine. The result of this collaboration is the Integrated Medical Environment™ (tIME™), which we believe could lead to better insights into complex physiology, early detection of secondary insults, reduction in medical errors, improved efficiency, and most importantly, better patient outcomes. We believe that this approach could fundamentally change the way medicine is practiced.