New AI Tech Advances Both Ends of Stroke Care
Brainomix and Brain.Q are advancing stroke care through innovative technologies. Both companies aim to address critical gaps in stroke care, from acute treatment to long-term rehabilitation and are gaining recognition for their contributions to the field.
IMAGE CREDIT: RON LEVINE VIA GETTY IMAGES
At a Glance
- Brain.Q’s non-invasive, cloud-connected device uses low-intensity electromagnetic fields to enhance recovery.
- Brainomix’s AI solutions for stroke diagnosis have demonstrated a 50% increase in patients receiving mechanical thrombectomy.
- Both Brainomix and Brain.Q technologies highlight the potential for improved stroke diagnosis and treatment.
George Harston, MD, chief medical and innovation officer for Oxford, U.K.-based Brainomix, said the appeal of the company’s technology is fairly simple.
In explaining the company’s variety of AI-assisted stroke diagnosis tools, Harston distilled its strategy to a concise “But I think the way we differentiate is that we really focus on the biggest unmet needs.”
Those needs for the massive worldwide stroke treatment market entail better and quicker decision support tools when a patient presents in a clinical setting, as well as better recovery tools after the acute phase of treatment has ended.
Presenting at the recent European Stroke Organization Conference (ESOC), Brainomix demonstrated its suite can significantly help physicians on the front end of diagnosing and referring stroke patients to specialist treatment. On the post-treatment end, Jerusalem, Israel-based Brain.Q technologies also presented data on its pioneering AI to deliver tailored therapies to the entire central nervous system.
The two technologies may exemplify the ability of improved diagnostic support and treatment tools to significantly reduce the long-term burden on stroke patients.
“When you think about our healthcare system, it’s tuned toward acute intervention and to keep patients alive,” Yotam Drechsler, CEO and co-founder of Brain.Q, said. “But how do you treat them later?”
The issue is well-recognized across the neurological community.
“Even if strokes are generally considered and managed as a transient condition, most stroke survivors suffer from persistent critical limitations in the activities of daily living,” Alessio Baricich, Grazia F. Spitoni, and Giovanni Marone wrote in a 2022 editorial in Frontiers in Neurology. Fifty percent of stroke survivors report unmet needs such as incontinence, emotional problems, mobility, pain, and speaking problems. However, most of them do not receive a rehabilitative follow-up or other therapeutic approaches.”
At the results presented at ESOC, both companies demonstrated findings that their technologies might be harbingers of improved outcomes: Brainomix data on more than 80,000 patients in the U.K. over a three-year period, showed use of its 360 Stroke platform was associated with an additional 50% increase in the number of patients receiving mechanical thrombectomy. Use of the technology also improved the speed of treatment by 49 minutes. In announcing the results, the company also noted the data “builds on a growing body of evidence validating the impact of Brainomix’s stroke AI imaging platform: a study published in January, also in Frontiers in Neurology, showed that the implementation of Brainomix 360 Stroke at the Royal Berkshire Hospital improved patient outcomes, trebling the number of stroke patients achieving functional independence from 16% to 48%.”
The deployment of Stroke 360 is especially targeted toward “spoke and hub” hospital systems, in which a patient may present at a time or place where specialized stroke care and imaging is unavailable.
“Eighty percent of people who may be having a stroke will go to their local non-specialist first, such as a generalist practitioner” Harston said, “and that’s where the biggest gain is. We also address improving treatment depending on the type of imaging available. At a specialist facility, you can get any kind of imaging you want or need. At the stroke hospitals where they don’t have the expertise or imaging, our technology focuses on those problems. We focus on what we call simple imaging – non-contrast CT scans, for example – to use AI to get the most information out of that data. There is enough information in those scans to make decisions about those patients. But although those scans are easy to take the picture, they are the hardest to interpret, particularly if you are less expert.”
Harston said the company, which spun out of the University of Oxford, is now expanding its commercial footprint in the U.S. It announced in March 2023 FDA clearance of its flagship e-ASPECTS software, which assesses non-contrast CT scans to automatically generate an ASPECTS score; later in the year, FDA approved 360 e-CTP and Brainomix 360 e-MRI, both software modules that can support thrombolysis and thrombectomy treatment decisions, particularly for late-window patients who present to hospital more than 6-12 hours after stroke onset.
He also noted Brainomix is following its academic origins by collaborating with leading stroke research centers in the U.S., including the Mayo Clinic, Emory University, Mount Sinai, and UCLA.
“We’re not arrogant enough to think the evidence we have generated and the value we have clearly managed to demonstrate in Europe could just be directly translated to the U.S.,” he said. “There are different drivers and ways of working.”
Brain.Q targets rehab with AI and electromagnetism
Brain.Q is not as far along the path to commercialization as Brainomix but is laying the foundations for its technology; Drechsler estimated it will receive CE Mark sometime in 2024, likely in the third quarter. The company has already received FDA breakthrough device designation, was named to Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech list in 2023, and won “Best New Technology Solution – Therapeutic” in the MedTech Breakthrough Awards 2024.
While Brainomix targets the first steps of stroke treatment, the Brain.Q technology is intended for the follow-up treatments necessary to regain functional use of affected limbs and a semblance of independence. In essence, the non-invasive, cloud-connected Brain.Q device, which can be used in a clinical setting or at home, uses a layered combination of supervised learning and explanatory AI to deliver extremely low frequency, low intensity electromagnetic fields (EMFs) to the patient’s central nervous system.
The company has collected data from eletrophysiology measurements from healthy individuals as well as those who have suffered a stroke: Brain.Q operates on the premise that exposing such unhealthy individuals to specific EMF frequencies associated with healthy functioning may improve network plasticity and functional ability.
Drechsler said the EMF frequencies are not detectable, yet the results presented at ESOC demonstrated impressive results: Patients who received BRAIN.Q active therapy were more than twice as likely to achieve full recovery within three months, going back to live independently at home, returning to work and social activities, compared to the sham control group. The study also reached 86% compliance rate, which Drechsler said is a hallmark of the convenience of at-home therapy.
