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Saving Lives by Accelerating the Treatment of Neurological Emergencies

THE PROBLEM


Neurological emergencies such as stroke cause time-dependent brain damage. But no treatment for any neurological emergency can be administered if the patient is not quickly diagnosed and taken to the correct hospital.


HOW THE VIRTUAL NEUROLOGIST WORKS


Our Virtual Neurologist is a cloud-based system based on established natural language and computer vision services that can diagnose neurological emergencies by direct communication with, and examination of, the patient using any video conferencing technology. Once the diagnostic evaluation is finished, the Virtual Neurologist will then direct on-site treatments and guide the patient's transportation to the correct hospital for more specialized treatment. Patients who have uncertain diagnoses will be referred to an on-call neurologist for evaluation.


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CLINICAL NEED


Consider just one of the many neurological emergencies: stroke.

Stroke is the #1 cause of disability and the 2nd most common cause of death globally. In the US, nearly 800,000 cases of stroke occur each year, costing approximately $37 billion in healthcare expenses, there 17+ million cases of stroke annually of which 5.7 million are fatal. Some types of stroke currently can be treated with intravenous injection of a medicine, rtPA.

By delivering the patient to the hospital with the diagnosis of acute stroke established, the patient then only needs routine neuroimaging to establish the correct diagnosis which leads to IV rtPA treatment. Doing so eliminates the need for in-hospital physician evaluation, saving on-average 83 minutes of time to IV rtPA treatment.

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This time saved translates into 37% increase in rtPA effectiveness and 3 times the number of treated patients. Due to its scalability, the Virtual Neurologist can be used in approximately 81,000 ambulances in the U.S. and 178,000 ambulances in Europe. Emergency departments in hospitals without neurologist services would similarly benefit from the Virtual Neurologist.

SOCIAL IMPACT


In the so-called developed world, only about half of people live close enough to hospitals staffed by neurologists to receive the time-limited emergency treatments for neurological emergencies like stroke. For example, in the US, only about 25% of the 5,700 hospitals are capable of treating stroke patients because of the limited number of neurologists. Not surprisingly, there is no possibility that those neurologists could provide diagnostic evaluations to the 9.8 million people with neurological emergencies who are first seen in the 81,000 U.S.-based ambulances.

In the rest of the world, the problem is even greater, as the number of hospitals and ambulances increases with the population, whereas the number of neurologists becomes diminishes.

The Virtual Neurologist can overcome the limited resource that is the human neurologist's diagnostic evaluation. Because it is infinitely scalable and operable in any language, the Virtual Neurologist will diagnose neurological emergencies in any hospital and any ambulance worldwide, enabling rapid treatment of patients with neurological emergencies. Existing treatments will get used more frequently and more effectively, and new treatments can be developed for previously-untreatable neurological emergencies.


The Virtual Neurologist is currently in development.  No product is yet available for sale.

CONTACT US


+1 (510) 986-4367
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