ELECTRICAL BIOIMPEDANCE CEREBRAL MONITORING : A Study of Cerebral Impedance Variation

Abstract: Stroke is amongst the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Today diagnosis of Stroke is restricted to fixed imaging facilities which do not provide a rapid diagnostic. A portable device which could provide a non invasive assessment of stroke would therefore decrease the time of diagnosis and increase the chance of survival. Recent studies have confirmed that Implementing Electrical Bioimpedance in a portable device could provide a reliable means for Stroke diagnostic. However in order to be able to use the brain impedance as an indicator of Stroke, the invariance of brain impedance with time in healthy individuals should be studied first. Experimental Bioimpedance Spectroscopy (BIS) measurements from a healthy control group of 10 subjects have been used in this study to inspect the variation of brain impedance in the span of two weeks. The results of this study suggest that the cap which was used for brain impedance measurements together with  the available device have not been an optimal way of measuring the brain impedance and therefore have affected the data by causing artifacts for the results. With the artifacts available in the data acquired in this study it is not possible to make any statements about the variation of brain impedance and therefore a deeper analysis of collected data using descriptive analysis is required in order to be able to judge on the significance of the obtained errors. In the future a larger study group should be considered in order to increase the predictive power of the observations.