Monitoring of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism in Intensive Care

Until recently the determination of cerebral blood flow was limited to intermittent measurements and particulary difficult to perform in critically ill patients. Monitoring of cerebral blood flow was an unreached goal. This book gives an update of the methods nowadays available to measure and monitor cerebral blood flow and cerebral oxygenation, especially in critically ill patients. In a first chapter various techniques to measure cerebral blood flow discontinuously are discussed, like the Kety-Schmidt technique, 133-Xenon-CBF and CT-CBF with stable synon. Thereafter various methods to continuously estimate cerebral blood flow are described, like thermodiffusion techniques, monitoring of tissue pO2, dopplersonography, laser-doppler-spectropscopy, near infrared spectroscopy and monitoring of oxygen saturation in the jugular bulb. The last method is highlighted and extensively discussed with its different indications.