Venkatakrishna Rajajee, MBBS

Dr. Venkatakrishna Rajajee completed his medical training at the Madras Medical College in India. He completed his residency in Neurology at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York in 2003, followed by fellowships in Stroke/ Vascular Neurology and Neurological Critical Care at the UCLA Medical Center 2003-2005. In addition, he has several years of experience in private practice as an attending physician in medical/ surgical intensive care units. He joined the University of Michigan’s neurosurgery department 2008 as faculty neurointensivist and vascular neurologist. He has served as the medical director of neurocritical care since 2014 and as co-director of the comprehensive stroke center since 2017.

Dr. Rajajee has had a clinical, educational, and research interest in critical care ultrasound since 2007. He is a diplomate of the National Board of Echocardiography. He has published several articles on optic nerve ultrasound and transcranial doppler in neurocritical care, and helped pioneer the use of real-time ultrasound guidance during bedside tracheostomy in 2011. Dr. Rajajee developed and directed the Neurocritical Care Society’s (NCS) annual critical care ultrasound workshop between 2012-2014, and has served on the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s (SCCM) Ultrasound Committee. He currently coordinates the University of Michigan’s multidisciplinary critical care ultrasound lecture series.

His other interests include the monitoring and management of patients with severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). In 2013, Michigan Medicine signed a memorandum of understanding on collaboration in research and education with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, with TBI as a major focus. As part of this collaboration, Dr. Rajajee has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study techniques of intracranial pressure assessment applicable to low and middle income nations. He has also received funding from the Department of Defense (DoD) to evaluate noninvasive techniques to assess the brain following TBI.

He is a former chair of the Neurocritical Care Society’s Guidelines Committee, and the GRADE methodologist of the NCS guidelines for neuroprognostication in neurocritical care. He is the first author of the 2023 Guidelines for Neuroprognostication in Comatose Adult Survivors of Cardiac Arrest.

Neurological critical care, stroke neurology

University of Michigan Health participates with most health insurance plans.

Noninvasive assessment intracranial pressure, critical care ultrasound, subarachnoid hemorrhage, severe traumatic brain injury and novel techniques of tracheostomy in the critically ill.