Determining the time a stroke took place is essential in deciding how to treat the patient. — dpa
Artificial intelligence (AI) could be twice as accurate as current methods in pinpointing the time a stroke took place, according to a study.
This could help medics make better emergency decisions about care.
The team behind the software claim it is twice as accurate as current methods, which involve doctors visually assessing a scan to make treatment decisions.
Study lead author and Imperial College London clinical PhD fellow Dr Adam Marcus said: “We estimate that up to 50% more stroke patients could be treated appropriately with treatments because of our method.
“We aim to deploy our software in the NHS [UK National Health Service], possibly by integrating with existing AI-analytic software that is already in use in hospital Trusts.”
The algorithm was created by researchers at Imperial and Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom, and the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
It was trained using 800 brain scans where the time of stroke was known and then tested on 2,000 patients.
The study found that the model was twice as accurate as the visual method, which researchers suggest could be due to the fact that it takes in additional features from scans, such as texture.
Patients who go to hospital with suspected stroke are given a CT (computed tomography) scan to determine the cause and severity, within an hour where possible.
Doctors then review the results and make decisions on treatment, in which time is an important factor.
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Thrombolysis, a process that uses drugs to break up blood clots, can be performed within four and a half hours of symptoms starting.
A thrombectomy – where doctors surgically remove a blood clot to restore blood flow – is most effective six hours after symptoms start, although it can be performed for up to 24 hours in rare cases.
Senior study author and Imperial’s Department of Brain Sciences senior clinical research fellow and consultant neurologist Dr Paul Bentley said: “It’s essential for doctors to know both the initial onset time, as well as whether a stroke could be reversed.
“Having this information at their fingertips will help doctors to make emergency decisions about what treatments should be undertaken in stroke patients.
“Not only is our software twice as accurate at time reading as current best practice, but it can be fully automated once a stroke becomes visible on a scan.”
The study is published in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine. – PA Media/dpa
