Grant: Project Grant

When patients are in the intensive care unit (ICU), their muscles can weaken, causing long-lasting problems with muscle strength and daily activities. We do not fully understand why this happens, and measuring muscle strength in the ICU is challenging. Our goal is to figure out how, when and why this muscle weakness occurs and how it affects people after leaving the ICU. We will do this by taking advantage of computed tomography (CT) scans that were already acquired while patients were in the ICU. Specifically, our interdisciplinary team will investigate muscle loss during an ICU stay and its effect on patient outcomes. By studying CT scans taken at different times throughout the ICU stay, we'll track changes in abdominal muscles that are related to whole body muscle mass. We will train an automated method to identify the muscles we are interested in so that we can process a larger amount of data. We will also use information from medical records about the patients and the reasons for their ICU stay. This will help us understand when and in whom the most muscle loss happens. We will also investigate if the muscle loss in the ICU relates to how well people recover. By checking CT measurements and physical abilities three months after leaving the ICU, we aim to find out if these measurements can predict how someone will function in the long run. In addition to losing muscle mass, we are looking at how fat and fibrosis affect the muscle, and whether we can assess these properties by measuring changes in muscle density in CT scans acquired during the ICU stay. This will help us understand why muscles weaken without needing an invasive biopsy. Using CT scans, we can understand when, how and in whom muscles weaken in the ICU to better target rehabilitation strategies. The methods we develop will also help investigate muscle size and quality without invasive methods, which can be applied in the future to study loss of muscle strength in other acute and chronic diseases.