Cerebral microbleeds after use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in children.

Cerebral microbleeds (CMB) on gradient-recalled echo (GRE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are rarely seen in children, yet have been described following vascular procedures in adults. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been associated with vascular injury and neurological events in children, but there have been no reports to date of GRE MRI findings in children treated with ECMO. We reviewed MRI scans for all vascular neurology consultations in children treated with ECMO at an academic medical center over a 5-year period.

Predictive combinations of monitor alarms preceding in-hospital code blue events.

Bedside monitors are ubiquitous in acute care units of modern healthcare enterprises. However, they have been criticized for generating an excessive number of false positive alarms causing alarm fatigue among care givers and potentially compromising patient safety. We hypothesize that combinations of regular monitor alarms denoted as SuperAlarm set may be more indicative of ongoing patient deteriorations and hence predictive of in-hospital code blue events.

Curriculum-based neurosurgery digital library.

Background: Recent work-hour restrictions and the constantly evolving body of knowledge are challenging the current ways of teaching neurosurgery residents.

Objective: To develop a curriculum-based digital library of multimedia content to face the challenges in neurosurgery education.

Method: We used the residency program curriculum developed by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons to structure the library and Microsoft Sharepoint as the user interface.

A comparison of vital signs charted by nurses with automated acquired values using waveform quality indices.

Objective: (1) To investigate if there exist any discrepancies between the values of vital signs charted by nurses and those recorded by bedside monitors for a group of patients admitted for neurocritical care. (2) To investigate possible interpretations of discrepancies by exploring information in the alarm messages and the raw waveform data from monitors.

Methods: Each charted vital sign value was paired with a corresponding value from data collected by an archival program of bedside monitors such that the automatically archived data preceded the charted data and had minimal time lag to the charted value.