By CICI ZHOU
MedGadget — Strokes affect nearly 800,000 Americans per year. One of the most important prognostic factors is the time from symptom onset to treatment. Currently, strokes are usually diagnosed by first-responders using a quick physical exam — a subjective method that can result in incorrect diagnoses, delayed treatment, and poor outcomes.
Forest Devices hopes to change that. The Pittsburgh-based company’s product, ALPHASTROKE, is a portable triage tool that allows first-responders to diagnose strokes more accurately than with a conventional clinical exam. The company’s studies have shown that ALPHASTROKE can diagnose strokes with over 90% sensitivity and specificity, compared to 70% with the best clinical exams.
Key to the ALPHASTROKE technology is somatosensory evoked potentials, sensed via electroencephalography (EEG). The patient is given a physical “tapping” stimulus on certain areas of the body, and the ALPHASTROKE device then measures how well that stimulus is registered in the brain.