The Incubator

Send us Fan Mail The transfusion threshold consensus is here — but practice hasn't fully caught up. In the second episode of On with VON, Ben and Daphna sit down with Dr. Roger Soll and Dr. Ravi Patel to extend the conversation from the Vermont Oxford Network Grand Rounds on evidence to practice for transfusion thresholds. The core finding across trials is consistent: lower thresholds for bot...

Send us Fan Mail The AAP has weighed in on therapeutic hypothermia for HIE, and Daphna walks through the clinical report in full. The core eligibility criteria haven't moved — but the edges have gotten more nuanced. Late initiation, the 35-week zone, mild HIE, sentinel events, MRI timing, and feeding during cooling are all addressed. Also this week: a prospective pilot from Australia tests wh...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Neo News, Ben and Eli discuss a sobering Guttmacher Institute study recently featured in Bloomberg. Analyzing data from 2005 to 2023, the research reveals a troubling association between restrictive abortion laws and increased maternal mortality, specifically driven by cardiovascular complications and violent deaths. The hosts explore the clinical and social pat...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben reviews a secondary analysis of the CALI trial, published in JAMA Network Open, examining two-year neurodevelopmental and pulmonary outcomes in preterm infants who received early caffeine combined with LISA versus caffeine and CPAP alone. Building on the original CALI trial's finding that early caffeine prior to LISA reduced intubation rates...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Daphna presents the F-NeoBright trial — a pilot feasibility and safety study out of Hungary exploring intranasal fresh breast milk administration in neonates with moderate to severe HIE undergoing therapeutic hypothermia. With so few adjunct therapies available beyond cooling, the idea of harnessing breast milk's rich bioactive components — inclu...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben takes the lead and reviews a prospective cohort pilot study from the Archives of Disease in Childhood examining whether combining abdominal ultrasound with plain radiography can improve surgical risk stratification in neonates with suspected NEC. With mortality remaining as high as 20–40% and diagnosis still heavily reliant on clinical judgment, t...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna dive into the American Academy of Pediatrics' February Clinical Report on Therapeutic Hypothermia for Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy. Daphna, who presented this paper at the Florida Neonatal Neurologic Network, walks us through the key action statements — from the established 33.5°C target temperature to the more nuanced...

Send us Fan Mail In this Tech Tuesday episode, Ben sits down with Dr. Itamar Nitzan and Alon Meritrikin-Gold, the co-founders of SkinCubator, a revolutionary wearable incubator designed to transform neonatal skin-to-skin care. They discuss how reframing kangaroo care from a rare procedure to a continuous necessity inspired this paradigm-shifting device. The hosts dive into the clinical logistics,...

Send us Fan Mail In this interview episode, Ben and Daphna sit down with Professor Brett Manley to discuss a paradigm shift in neonatal research: adaptive platform trials. Frustrated by the inefficiencies and underpowered results of traditional RCTs, Dr. Manley outlines the ambitious Platypus Adaptive Platform Trial launching in Australia and New Zealand. They dive into how shared primary outcomes...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Incubator Podcast, Ben and Daphna cover five topics spanning clinical practice, emerging technology, and neonatal policy. They open with a large Swedish national cohort study from JAMA Network Open examining early prophylactic hydrocortisone in extremely preterm infants, debating whether a blanket approach to BPD prevention holds up across gestational ages and in...

Send us Fan Mail In this Neo News segment, Ben and Eli tackle a pressing Stateline report on the paradoxical struggle of freestanding birth centers. While hospital labor and delivery units are closing nationwide, alternative birth centers are facing aggressive regulatory hurdles and forced closures in states like Alabama. The hosts discuss the downstream effects on maternal health equity, the rise...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna explore an exciting new frontier in neonatology: oculomics. Reviewing a recent paper from JAMA Ophthalmology, they discuss how deep learning models applied to routine ROP screening images can predict the development of BPD and pulmonary hypertension in preterm infants. By combining visual features extracted via neural networks with stan...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Journal Club, Ben and Daphna review a pivotal paper from the Journal of Pediatrics led by the Pediatric Pulmonary Hypertension Network (PPHNet). The study explores invasive hemodynamic metrics and long-term outcomes in infants with BPD-associated pulmonary hypertension. Surprisingly, researchers found an almost equal distribution of pulmonary hypertension across...

Send us Fan Mail In this Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna review a systematic review and meta-analysis from JAMA Network Open questioning the clinical value of predischarge car seat tolerance screening (CSTS). Driven by data suggesting that testing does not reduce 30-day mortality or hospital readmissions, they discuss the high failure rates, varying definitions of bradycardia and desaturation...

Send us Fan Mail In this Daily Journal Club episode, Ben and Daphna review a massive Swedish national cohort study from JAMA Network Open examining early prophylactic hydrocortisone in extremely preterm infants. They discuss the targeted regimens used, differences in gestational age outcomes, and whether a blanket prophylactic approach is truly effective for preventing BPD. With impressive data co...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Kelly Mahaney, Assistant Professor of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Stanford and researcher focused on the role of iron in post hemorrhagic hydrocephalus, joins the podcast to challenge the traditional watch and wait approach to IVH complications. She describes Stanford’s early radiographic intervention pathway, which has reduced shunt dependency from 90% to 45% in reservoir-place...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Clara Song, neonatal intensivist with Southern California Permanente Medical Group, Chair of the AAP Section on Neonatal Perinatal Medicine Executive Committee, and founding leader of the Women in Neonatology group, shares the lessons from her Cool Topics talk on quiet power and soft skills in leadership. She explores how communication, emotional intelligence, and servant lead...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Sanjay Sinha, interventional pediatric cardiologist, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at CHOC and UCI, and Co-Director of the UCLA Congenital Lymphatic Imaging and Intervention Program, opens a new chapter for neonatologists on neonatal chylothorax and lymphatic disease. He explains how to recognize lymphatic mimickers at the bedside, why woody edema should raise the index of...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Robin Steinhorn, Professor and Vice Dean for Children’s Clinical Services at UC San Diego and President of Children’s Specialists of San Diego, tackles one of neonatology’s most uncomfortable conversations: compensation. She breaks down how to identify reliable benchmark data, explains why neonatologists are generating more RVUs than ever while pay has not kept pace with workl...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Susan Hintz, Medical Director of the Fetal and Pregnancy Health Program and Robert L. Hess Family Endowed Professor at Stanford Medicine, delivers this year’s Cool Topics keynote on collaboration, shared purpose, and the lessons learned building high risk infant follow-up infrastructure through the CPQCC. She challenges the neonatal community to move beyond the handoff to a pe...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Caitlin Carter, Clinical Director of Nephrology at Rady Children’s Hospital and associate clinical professor at UC San Diego, joins the podcast to challenge how neonatologists recognize and follow up on acute kidney injury. She explains why creatinine alone is insufficient, how biomarkers like NGAL can detect tubular injury before function declines, and why AKI too often disap...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Tarah Colaizy, Professor of Neonatology at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital and Medical Director of the Mother’s Milk Bank of Iowa, challenges the one size fits all approach to nutrition in periviable infants. She shares the Iowa philosophy of individualized, principle driven feeding management, explains why rigid protocol adherence can backfire in the m...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Satyan Lakshminrusimha, Chair of Pediatrics and Pediatrician in Chief at UC Davis Children’s Hospital, makes a compelling case for rebranding and restructuring neonatology as a field. He argues for adopting the title of neonatal critical care physician, addresses the stark disparity between NICU revenue generation and neonatologist compensation, and outlines a step by step res...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Elizabeth Crouch, neonatologist, neuroscientist, and physician scientist at UCSF and co-host of At the Bench on The Incubator Podcast, joins Ben and Daphna live at Cool Topics to discuss palliative and comfort care in the NICU. Drawing from her research on organ donation, autopsy, and research donation after neonatal loss, Dr. Crouch shares how meaning making supports families...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Jochen Profit, Chair and Principal Investigator at CPQCC and Wendy J. Tomlin-Hess Endowed Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, joins the podcast to discuss what truly separates high performing NICUs from the rest. He makes the case for process metrics over mortality as quality markers, highlighting normothermia on admission, breast milk feeding at discharge, and infec...