Parenteral nutrition diagnostic system, apparatus, and method

Abstract

A parenteral nutritional diagnostic system, apparatus, and method are disclosed. In an example embodiment, a parenteral nutritional diagnostic apparatus determines muscle quantity and muscle quality of a patient's psoas muscle to determine a nutritional status of the patient. An image interface is configured to receive a medical image including radiodensity data related to imaged tissue of the patient. The apparatus also includes a processor configured to use the medical image to determine a tissue surface area for each different value of radiodensity and determine a distribution of the tissuesurface area for each radiodensity value. The processor is configured to determine muscle quality by locating a soft tissue peak within the distribution that corresponds to a local peak in at a region related to at least one of muscle tissue, organ tissue, and intramuscular adipose tissue. The processor determines the nutritional status of the patient based on soft tissue peak.

Description

Background technique [0001] The body's metabolic response to surgery, cancer treatment, injury, infection or premature birth often depends on the shift of amino acids from lean body mass reserve sites to sites of active protein synthesis. Additionally, the toxicity of some chemotherapeutic drugs used in cancer treatment can depend on the distribution of the drug between fat and lean body mass (mass) tissue. Studies have found that a deficiency of muscle mass throughout the body, likely indicating insufficient amino acid reserves, impairs the healing blood supply lines, thereby hampering the body's ability to maintain adequate rates of protein synthesis at surgical sites or injured areas. Amino acid insufficiency reduces muscle mass, which impairs the body's metabolic response to surgery, treatment, or injury and leads to longer recovery times and increases the postoperative (or postoperative) risk of postoperative complications, infection, etc. Together, these deficiencies ma...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0003] Unfortunately, visual inspection and BMI calculations do not provide patients with a medically solid picture of their nutritional status, as these assessments are heavily influenced by total body fat mass and do not accurately assess muscle mass or muscle quality

Also, both evaluations rely on determining the patient's fat content rather than muscle mass or muscle mass because skeletal muscle and connective tissue cannot be easily visualized

Thus, both assessments are known to give the false impression that the patient has an acceptable nutritional status when in fact the patient has a significant decrease in muscle mass

In addition, visual inspection is based on the subjective assessment of the clinician and may lead to inconsistent application for different clinicians

Another disadvantage of known assessment methods is that in some time-sensitive situations, clinicians may not have the opportunity to perform visual or semi-subjective assessments prior to performing critical medical procedures

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