Advanced monitor developed at UVa helping babies

In the world of perfect birth plans, Ainsley Layne would be in the last weeks of her first pregnancy.

But earlier this summer, the first-time mother went into premature labor and delivered her son, Charles Michael Layne III, on June 11 at just 28 weeks gestation.

Her official due date was Sept. 28.

“I went into the labor and by the end of the night, we were here at NICU,” Layne said. “This wasn’t the way I was expecting my first birthing experience to be, but we’re fortunate he’s doing so well.”

Doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center say baby Charlie is getting stronger every day and he is slated to go home soon.

He and others in the UVa Neonatal Intensive Care Unit are benefitting from a monitor that detects slight changes in their heartbeats that could be signs of major infections.

Researchers at UVa developed the Heart Rate Observation System (HeRO monitor), which uses information gathered from the heart rate monitor to determine shifts in the heart rate on a continual basis.

“Charlie had pneumonia twice and when the monitor went up too high, they would draw blood and start cultures to make sure he wasn’t getting sick,” Layne said. “It’s a comfort to know that technology is available here.”

Researchers at UVa have been working on the HeRO monitor for more than 10 years and it’s now being used in a handful of NICUs around the country.

It all started when researchers identified characteristic changes in the heart rate of babies with illness that appear 12 or more hour before the infants showed any clinical signs.

“We thought we could use this information to prevent these babies from becoming seriously ill,” Dr. J. Randall Moorman, a UVa cardiologist, said. “It stands to reason that early diagnosis and an early start on treatment should improve the outcome of the infant.”

The monitor is especially critical for premature infants — especially those weighing 3 pounds or less at birth — because they are more vulnerable to sepsis, a potentially deadly bacterial infection.

“It’s essentially an early warning system, especially for sepsis,” said Dr. Karen Fairchild, a neonatologist at UVa who relies on the HeRO monitor. “It’s a way we can tell among the 45 babies in the NICU which ones are starting to get sick and need extra attention. For example, this way we can treat sepsis early before the baby gets terribly sick.”

Without the HeRO monitor, doctors and nurses have to rely on their own observations to detect early warning signs.

“The HeRO monitor picks up things you wouldn’t notice on the standard heart rate monitor,” Fairchild said. “A lot of the symptoms of sepsis in the early stage are subtle, and they’re also nonspecific, meaning they’re things premature babies do all the time, even when they’re not septic.”

A recent multicenter study of the HeRO monitor showed the device reduced mortality by more than 20 percent, saving one infant’s life for every 48 who were monitored. The study was co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Medical Predictive Science Corp.

Moorman hopes his research can one day be used for early detection of ailments of older patients or those who cannot speak for themselves.

“Discovering infections that develop during hospitalization is critical to patient survival,” Moorman said. “We are continuing that research now.”

As for Layne, she will spend the next week or so traveling from her home in Buckingham County to see her son in the NICU. Last week, he was already weighing in at almost 6 pounds and he was feeding from a bottle.

The nurses in the NICU have even talked to Layne, who graduated in the spring from the Lynchburg Hospital School of Nursing, about becoming one of them, something Layne said she never thought of before spending the first 12 weeks of her son’s life there. She said the doctors, nursing staff and other families have become like extended family and they all celebrate when one of the babies gets to go home.

“There are good times and bad times here,” Layne said. “Time goes by really fast here, but it’s good to know that Charlie gets so much love and care when we can’t be here with him.”