When applicable (conscious patient and/or family or legally authorized representative is present) the study will be introduced to the patient and relevant parties prior to the research team approaching the patient. While head trauma frequently results in impaired cognition and/or consciousness, and due to the urgency of these circumstances patients are often not accompanied by kin, whenever appropriate, the purpose of the research and the procedure will be explained in detail with all questions answered to the patient's and/or representative's satisfaction. Because patients who sustain head trauma injuries typically remain within the hospital for multiple days for monitoring and care, each participant may undergo multiple Computed Tomography (CT) scans over the course of his or her hospitalization, affording the opportunity of one to numerous measurements from each patient during his or her hospital stay.~Upon presentation to the casualty unit at MRRH and following each CT scan, the study team will approach the patient to scan the patient's cranium with the InfraScanner 2000™ (Image A). If permission is granted, the study team member sequentially measure the optical absorption for each of the 8 quadrants of the scalp (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital bilaterally) (Image B). The device is engineered such that the light emitter and receiver are spaced 4 cm apart, allowing the light's intensity to be measured between adjacent light guides (Image C). This entire procedure, including greeting and scanning the patient should take <10 minutes. Subsequent CT scan(s) the patient receives determines the number of potential data collections.~The patient and/or representative may refuse a scan during any encounter, and as such, the scan will not be done. For each patient scanned with the InfraScanner 2000™ they will be de-identified with a subject number, with age, sex, gender, skin color, hair color, hair thickness, mechanism of injury, Glasgow Coma Scale score, and mean time elapsed between CT scan and near-infrared measurement. These data will be stored in de-identified form on the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) database and/or Microsoft Excel 2016 on a secured network drive within the Department of Neurosurgery at Duke.~The collection period for each research subject concludes 30-days following his or her initial measurement with the InfraScanner 2000™, patient discharge, or patient death.
The goal of this study is to determine the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of the a portable near-infrared-based device (portable NIR-based device), the InfraScanner 2000™, to detect intracranial hematomas (epidural hematomas (EDH) and/or subdural hematomas (SDH)) in patients hospitalized at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital (MRRH) who have sustained or who are suspected to have sustained head trauma.