Recollecting the CNS Monitor
The Component Neuromonitoring System (CNS Monitor)
After the sale of Moberg Medical in 1998, we saw the opportunity to create a brain monitor for use in critical care. The patient monitors in every critical care room show continuous data about the hear and lungs, but if the problem was in the brain, where was the “patient monitor for the brain?” It didn’t exist, and the data to be displayed was in a variety of devices that weren’t connected to eachother.
So, Moberg Research (which became Moberg ICU Solutions) set out to build a patient monitor that could be used by a nurse as their bedside monitor that collected data from multiple brain monitors and recorded continuous EEG.
What we thought was a straightforward design problem became a challenging project spanning more than a decade. But, after twenty years, the resulting product still stands alone in its capabilities.
The CNS Monitor was the first device to collect high-resolution data from different neuromonitors and time synchronize it to a common clock, allowing correlations to be visualized.
Synchronized data shows the action of a vasopressor (given at red line) on other trends.
Our experience in connecting medical devices uncovered a wide range of quality and actual errors in operation for the devices we interfaced. Our work caught the eye of the FDA, who invited us to talk on this to members of their device group.
Due to its comprehensive data collection, the CNS Monitor became the standard data collection system for most clinical trials of traumatic brain injury.
Gary Trapuzzano, VP of R&D, worked with Dr. Jed Hartings for over a year to implement features to record and visualize slow potentials on the CNS Monitor. As a result, it is the preferred system for monitoring spreading depolarizations, an exciting new frontier in brain injury research.
CNS Envision showing spreading depolarizations
Moberg ICU Solutions, inventor of the CNS Monitor, was acquired by Micromed, which was ultimately acquired by Natus in 2023. The CNS Monitor, the first device to be FDA cleared to provide EEG integrated with data collected from other monitors, is now sold by Natus.
Prior history: The Neurotrac I, The Neurotrac II
