Impact of PICU Admission on Neurocognitive Function in Children

Abstract Objective To study the impact of admission to a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) on children's neurocognitive performance. Methods A case–control observational study including 50 children &amp; adolescents and 75 age and gender matched children and adolescents.The study subjects underwent formative IQ testing using the Stanford Binet IQ test 3 months after discharge from the PICU. Results 27 males and 23 females with a mean age of 6.98 years were included in the study. Almost two thirds of the cases were admitted to the PICU post operatively (surgical causes). More than half of the cases needed sedation, 38% needed mechanical ventilation and 12% needed inotropic support. There was no statistically significant difference between cases and controls are regard IQ scores (total, verbal and performance IQ scores), neither was there a difference between medical and surgical cases. Data from similar pediatric cohorts is conflicting. Conclusion PICU does not seem to affect cognitive outcome in pediatric survivors. Further long term studies using standard scoring systems and time points of assessment are required. </jats:sec

Rapid enhancement of cellular spheroid assembly by acoustically driven microcentrifugation

Intense acoustically driven microcentrifugation flows are employed to enhance the assembly of cellular spheroids in the microwell of a tissue culture well plate. This ability to interface microfluidics with commonly used tissue culture plasticware is a significant advantage as it can potentially be parallelized for high throughput operation and allows existing analytical equipment designed to fit current laboratory formats to be retained. The microcentrifugation flow, induced in the microwell coated with a low adhesive hydrogel, is shown to rapidly enhance the concentration of cells into tight aggregates within a minute - considerably faster than the conventional hanging drop and liquid overlay methods, which typically require days - while maintaining their viability. The proposed method also affords better control of the compaction force and hence the spheroid dimension simply by tuning the input power, which is a significant improvement over other microfluidic methods that require the fabrication of different geometries and microstructures to generate spheroids of different sizes. The spheroids produced are observed to exhibit the concentric heterogeneous cell populations and tight cell-cell interfaces typical of in vivo tumors, and are potentially useful in a broad spectrum of cancer biology and drug screening studies