Treatment and Management Methodology of Hydrocephalus: Application of Electronic Shunt Multiagent System (eShunt)

The diagnosis, treatment and management of hydrocephalus remain a challenging issue, particularly for diagnosis and prognosis of hydrocephalus, improving current shunt treatment, predicting its success and evaluating its functionality. Nowadays, diagnosis procedure depends mainly on the surgeons observation of the clinical symptoms, neuroimages and instantaneous of intracranial pressure recording. These lack accuracy in diagnosis and predicting the outcome. Dominant treatment relies on passive mechanical shunts; these also exhibit various problems. Adding to that, the lack of communication between the community surgeons and a limited understanding of the hydrodynamics of this disease has limited the effectiveness of hydrocephalus treatment. This paper proposes a new approach to automate and improve the treatment and management of hydrocephalus through a cognitive system over a distributed network of hydrocephalus patients with intelligent shunting system. This approach will not only develop autonomous treatment method for hydrocephalus, but also it defines a method for information acquiring and analysis to better understanding hydrocephalus and assesses shunt functionality.