A validation study for a new metric of cerebral autoregulation assessment

What is it about?

1. The brain is vulnerable to damage from too little or too much blood flow. A physiological mechanism termed cerebral autoregulation (CA) exists to maintain stable blood flow even if cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) is changing. 2.A robust method for assessing CA is not yet available. There are still some problems with the traditional measure, the pressure reactivity index (PRx).

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Why is it important?

1. We introduce a new method, the wavelet transform method (wPRx), to assess CA using data from two sets of controlled hypotension experiments in piglets: one set had artificially manipulated arterial blood pressure (ABP) oscillations; the other group were spontaneous ABP waves. 2. A significant linear relationship was found between wPRx and PRx in both groups, with wPRx providing a more stable result for the spontaneous waves. 3. Although both methods showed similar accuracy in distinguishing intact and impaired CA, it seems that wPRx tends to perform better than PRx, although not significantly so.

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