Paediatric Brain Trauma Data Informatics Research (KidsBrainIT) V1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Paediatric Brain Monitoring with Information Technology (KidsBrainIT): Using Information Technology (IT) Innovations to Improve Childhood Traumatic Brain Injury Intensive Care Management, Outcome, and Patient Safety
IRAS ID
221988
Contact name
Tsz-Yan Milly Lo
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
NHS Lothian
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
European Research Area Networks (ERA-NET NEURON), 50
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 6 months, days
Research summary
Brain trauma (TBI) is the main cause of death in children older than 1 year of age. Children surviving a life-threatening TBI have new disabilities that affect how they function throughout the rest of their lives which also has an impact on their carers and supporting community. Currently the best option to improve survival and recovery of children with life-threatening TBI is to improve their early intensive-care as none of the experiemental therapies tested in the laboratory are useful in clinical practice.
During treatment of children with life-threatening TBI, often much of the routine bedside monitoring data that is available for clinical interpretation is not fully used. Vital information from this data is discarded rather than being used to help clinicians improve treatments. Multicentre data collection and analysis of such ‘big-data’ in adult TBI have been shown to generate new research ideas and analysis methods. A good example of successful ‘big-data’ initiatives in adult brain trauma is the adult BrainIT group. No-one has attempted to setup a similar approach in children with brain trauma.
Using such ‘big-data’ from two children’s intensive-care-units (PICU) and working with the adult BrainIT group, we know that new research ideas, and treatment improvement measures are possible which can lead to huge advances in children’s brain trauma treatment. In this proposal, we are setting up a new childhood brain trauma ‘big-data’ initiative (KidsBrainIT) that uses high-quality data from TBI patients recruited in 10 PICU from 4 countries. Use of this data is expected to improve current treatment, patient safety and outcome.
Intensive-care treatment of brain trauma aims to treat a patient’s abnormal physiology that follows a brain injury. In this application, we will focus on improving treatments to two of these physiological insults: increase in pressure from brain swelling and brain perfusion pressure.REC name
West of Scotland REC 5
REC reference
17/WS/0086
Date of REC Opinion
1 Jun 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion