Physiological monitoring of the severe traumatic brain injury patient in the intensive care unit.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite encouraging animal research, pharmacological agents and neuroprotectants have disappointed in the clinical environment. Current TBI management therefore is directed towards identification, prevention, and treatment of secondary cerebral insults that are known to exacerbate outcome after injury. This strategy is based on a variety of monitoring techniques that include the neurological examination, imaging, laboratory analysis, and physiological monitoring of the brain and other organ systems used to guide therapeutic interventions. Recent clinical series suggest that TBI management informed by multimodality monitoring is associated with improved patient outcome, in part because care is provided in a patient-specific manner. In this review we discuss physiological monitoring of the brain after TBI and the emerging field of neurocritical care bioinformatics.