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New Innovation – Hopkins Detector Uses Video-Oculography for Faster Diagnosis of Strokes

New Innovation – Hopkins Detector Uses Video-Oculography for Faster Diagnosis of Strokes

| On 08, Mar 2013

As everyone knows by now, when someone experiences a stroke “time lost is brain lost.” But before treatment can begin, it is critical to confirm that the patient isn’t experiencing stroke-like symptoms from another, less life threatening condition.

CT scans are usually performed as soon as possible to diagnose a stroke, but they’re not definitive, while MRI suffers from high cost and the fact that many clinics simply don’t have one available for emergency use. A team from Johns Hopkins Medicine has developed a considerably cheaper solution that so far has performed just as well as MRI exams in identifying stroke in a small pilot study.

Strokes have unique symptoms, some of which can be spotted in eye movements of those afflicted. Yet, visual tests have been very subjective, requiring a physician to detect slight irregularities in the ocular movement.

The new system from Hopkins uses special glasses to track the eyeballs while a clinician performs head impulse testing (rotating the patient’s head while he looks at a stationary object). It is to be used specifically in patients presenting with dizziness/vertigo to differentiate between stroke and benign causes of the same symptoms. The researchers dub the technique as “ECG for the eyes,” being a fast and relatively easy parallel to how cardiac events are currently detected.