Abstract
There is a compelling need for a new form of head scanner to diagnose whether a patient is experiencing a stroke. Crucially, the scanner must be quickly and safely deployable at the site of the emergency to reduce the time between a diagnosis and treatment being commenced. That will help to improve the long-term outlook for many patients, which in turn will help to reduce the high cost of stroke to national economies. This paper describes a novel scanning method that utilises low-intensity electromagnetic waves in the radio frequency/microwave band to detect a stroke-affected region in the brain. This method has the potential to be low cost, portable, and widely deployable, and it is intrinsically safe for the patient and operator. It requires no specialist shielding or power supplies and, hence, can be rapidly deployed at the site of the emergency. That could be at the patient’s bedside within a hospital, at the patient’s home or place of work, or in a community setting such as a GP surgery or a nursing home. Results are presented from an extensive programme of scans of inanimate test subjects that are materially valid representations of a human head. These results confirm that the scanning method is indeed capable of detecting a stroke-affected region in these subjects. The significance of these results is discussed, as well as ways in which the efficacy of the scanning methodology could be further improved.
Highlights
Published: 6 September 2021Strokes are the 4th most prevalent cause of death and the leading cause of long-term invalidity in the UK [1]
The statistics are considerably worse with strokes being the 2nd most prevalent cause of death, they are only the 3rd leading cause of long-term invalidity [2]
To ensure consistency across the scans reported in this paper, the majority were carried out with the stroke inclusion at the 9 o’clock position on a clock face, as illustrated in Figure 11 for the 44 mm inclusion in the 175 mm phantom
Summary
Strokes are the 4th most prevalent cause of death and the leading cause of long-term invalidity in the UK [1]. The statistics are considerably worse with strokes being the 2nd most prevalent cause of death, they are only the 3rd leading cause of long-term invalidity [2]. Given that the total healthcare expenditure in the UK for 2018 was GBP 214.4bn, which accounted for about 10.0% of GDP that year [3], it is clear that the cost of stroke alone is a significant percentage. That cost is intimately linked to the survivability of stroke patients and the proportion who require protracted treatment and long-term rehabilitation. The percentage figure for that proportion is influenced by the time between the occurrence of their stroke and treatment being commenced. The often-quoted mantra in medical circles, “time is brain”, perfectly sums up the criticality of stroke patients receiving treatment promptly in order to save as much healthy brain tissue as possible and lessen
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