A Story of ShuntCheck

Vector blog from Children’s Hospital Boston has an interesting post about ShuntCheck, a device developed by a neurosurgeon uncle of a ten year old Spencer Neff who suffers from hydrocephalus. The device is designed to monitor the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through VP and other cerebral shunts. Since headaches can arise from an increased intracranial pressure above a blocked pathway, a visit to the emergency room was required every time a serious headache kicked in. The goal of a new device is to provide instant status check so that appropriate action can be taken earlier.
Read on from Vector:

Sam’s [Samuel Neff, neurosurgeon, uncle of Spencer Neff] clever idea was to detect flow by chilling some of the fluid in the shunt with an ice cube, and then test downstream for a drop in temperature. Such temperature-related tricks are used elsewhere in medicine (to measure cardiac output, for example). With his sons Daniel and Rob (then an engineering undergraduate at Drexel University), Sam made prototypes in his home shop, circuit boards, algorithms to interpret temperature changes in the skin over the shunt—and convinced himself with benchtop data and some testing on Spencer that the idea worked.