Wearable brain imaging for point-of-care stroke diagnosis

Suspected brain diseases are common, but challenging for ambulances. While most patients can go to standard hospitals, some need specialist surgery available at only 1 in 6 A&Es. Delayed treatment results in disability and death.

The most common emergencies are stroke and head injuries. Finding those most at risk without scans is essentially impossible.

Scans can only be done in hospitals using scanners the size of a car and the cost of a house. Patients who need specialist treatment are often transferred to the nearest non-specialist hospital first, then scanned, and then transferred to the specialist centre later, losing precious hours when minutes matter.

A small, cheap and "smart" brain scanner would bring imaging into ambulances and save lives.

We have developed a **scanner the size and cost of a defibrillator**, meaning it would be suitable as **standard ambulance equipment**. Our scanner can be small because it uses harmless (near-infrared) light.

We believe our scanner will help paramedics to help stroke patients by diagnosing them at the roadside, and taking them straight to the right hospital, saving lives.

In this project, we will develop our device further to detect strokes. We will:

1. Ensure our electronics are fine-tuned for 'seeing' stroke
2. Build the diagnostic artificial intelligence needed to enable the device to be used by people who are not trained to interpret medical imaging
3. Get data from healthy volunteers with as many different skin/hair colours as possible. This will help train our diagnostic artificial intelligence, and it will prevent the different light absorption of different skin/hair tones causing problems - meaning it works well for everyone

Following this project, we will use this prototype to run a study with real patients. If successful, the scanner could start saving lives in the real world: stroke affects 100,000 patients a year in the UK alone. The impact is enormous: between 1 and 3 out of 4 working-age stroke survivors are unable to return to work, stroke results in relationship trouble in two thirds of survivors, and three quarters of stroke carers put the survivor's needs over their own. The total cost of stroke is around £27 billion per year in the UK alone. Our technology could allow more people to return to living a normal life after stroke.