Andrew Dunn Discovers New Method for Monitoring Brain Blood Flow During Surgery

BME professor Andrew Dunn and a group of postdoctoral students have developed a technology for monitoring brain blood flow that addresses longstanding challenges.

It’s one thing to develop a breakthrough technique for medicine, quite another to develop something that is ready to implement into clinic with minimal adjustment to equipment that already exists. 

But that’s exactly what Dunn and his fellow biomedical engineers accomplished. This year, Dunn published blood flow imaging research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and received two R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health to enable further collaboration.

Dunn built on existing techniques of measuring bloodflow to the brain during neurosurgery (crucial for decision-making and health of the patient) to build a camera system that can integrate current understanding of blood flow dynamics and offer more granular information to clinicians and doctors. This could mean the difference between an educated guess by surgeons and a confident decision that leads to a full recovery.