Instantiating a mechatronic valve schedule for a hydrocephalus shunt

Hydrocephalus is caused by blockage or reabsorption difficulty that upsets the natural balance of production and absorption of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, resulting in a build-up of the fluid in the ventricles of the brain. One of the recent advances in the treatment of hydrocephalus is the invention of a mechatronic valve. The desirability of such valve lies in the potential of having shunt that not only control hydrocephalus but also seeks to treat it. In contrast to current valves, such a valve is regulated based on a time based schedule not on the differential pressure across the valve. Thus the effectiveness of such valve is highly dependant on selecting an appropriate valve schedule that delivers personal dynamic treatment for every individual patient. Providing such a schedule is likely to be one of the obstacles facing the implementation of the mechatronic valve. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to help in developing such a schedule that dynamically change based on the patients´ own intracranial pressure data and a novel figure of merit, thus providing the physician with an easy tool that facilitate the use of the mechatronic valve. The algorithm was implemented in M ATLAB^TM and Simulink^TM. Real ICP data for three hydrocephalus patients (before shunting) were used to test this algorithm and the resulted schedules along with the resulted intracranial pressure data have illustrated the effectiveness of the algorithm in providing schedule that maintain ICP within the normal limits.