PROJECT TITLE :

Design and Evaluation of an Automatic Extraventricular Drainage Control System

ABSTRACT:

Until these days, the drainage of cerebrospinal fluid, as necessary in case of an acute increased intracranial pressure, is conducted manually by adjusting the hydrostatic height of an external drainage bag. The associated issues with the manual open-loop management strategy are an increasing pressure error over time periods involving no correction and therefore the inherent risk of an overdrainage, which might occur, as an example, once changes of the patient's higher body inclination angle. During this paper, an automatic management strategy is prompt to alleviate these problems thereby increasing the patient's safety and the general quality of the therapy. The automated controller presented in this paper is intended for our newly developed intelligent external ventricular drainage system. The proposed controller has to ensure robustness and performance in face of uncertain patient intracranial dynamics and nonlinearities related to the actuator. The controller is therefore designed to ensure strong performance employing a mixed uncertainty modeling approach and extended by a self-scheduling approach to atone for input nonlinearities. Controller performance is validated in nonlinear simulations, an experimental test setup, and animal experiments, involving pigs with an artificially induced hydrocephalus.