Neurological monitoring

Abstract

Dealing with neurological critically ill patients is one of the most challenging situations in intensive care. The range of conditions can go from carbon dioxide narcosis to status epilepticus or hypoxic or traumatic brain injuries. The key difficulty is the neurological assessment of these patients while they require general anaesthesia. This chapter discusses neurological monitoring and includes discussion on intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring (including indications for ICP monitoring, methods of measuring ICP, complications of ICP monitoring, and ICP in normal and pathological conditions), intracranial perfusion (regulation of cerebral perfusion and measurement of cerebral blood flow), electroencephalogram (EEG) and cerebral function analysing monitoring (CFAM) (EEG, cerebral function monitors (CFM)/CFAM, EEG terminology, and clinical use in the intensive care unit), and other forms of neurological monitoring (tissue metabolism, cerebral blood flow and metabolism, and peripheral nerve and muscle electrophysiology).