Consensus Guidelines for Microdialysis Monitoring

The senior authors selected specific ‘key speakers’ to review a particular area of the literature. These individuals were selected based on their experience and contribution to the literature on a particular aspect of microdialysis monitoring. See Appendix 1 in the supplementary material for a list of key speakers and for the topics they each reviewed. The other participants of the meeting were identified through literature review and by correspondence with the key speakers who were able to identify other clinicians and scientists active in using microdialysis in neurocritical care patients. At the meeting, the literature was presented to the whole group followed by discussion to allow consensus generation. After the meeting, the recommendations were circulated to all participants allowing further discussion and revision.
In addition, for the purposes of the consensus statement, we performed a PubMed database search using the term microdialysis plus one of the following terms: ‘traumatic brain injury’, ‘brain injury’, ‘trauma’, ‘subarachnoid hemorrhage’, ‘stroke’, ‘epilepsy’, ‘intracerebral hematoma’ and ‘cost effectiveness’. We restricted our review to using articles published in the English language. Where recommendations are based on published observational data, the relevant references are given although formal grading was not performed. Where references are not provided, the recommendations are based on expert opinion.