Here’s a frightening scenario: your grandmother is having a seizure and you think it’s a stroke. Get on the phone and call the mobile stroke ambulance.
The mobile stroke ambulance? I had to read it twice, too. But developed by NeuroLogica Corporation and German based MEYTEC GmbH, the Stroke-Emergency-Mobile, VIMED STEMO provides the same care you’d receive in a specialized strike healthcare facility, right in the ambulance as you race to the hospital.
This is possible, the two companies said in a press release, from combining MEYTEC's telemedicine solutions with NeuroLogica's portable CT scanner, CereTom.
A Stroke is the third leading cause of death, with 140,000 victims every year.
With stroke, timing is everything. Have you heard of the “golden hour”? That’s the amount of time severely injured or sick patients have to live, if they can get care. With a stroke, it’s more like three hours, but it’s still very important to get them to a hospital.
The National Stroke Organization reports that fewer than 20 percent of major U.S. hospitals are stroke-certified, so think how much better off you are being treated before you even get to the hospital.
Up to 85 percent of strokes are caused by blood clots that cut off the brain’s blood supply. When heart muscle is deprived of blood and oxygen, heart muscle tissue dies, cutting off blood to the brain causing brain tissue to die.
But because of patient hesitation, unrecognized symptoms (often painless), or transportation delays, less than 2 percent who experience a stroke actually fall into the three-hour treatment window. Patients who arrive outside the three-hour window have limited options.
This is why an ambulance outfitted to care for stroke victims is so vital, and can mean the difference between life and death, or permanent disability. First conceived by the Charite-University Medicine Berlin, with the support of MEYTEC GmbH, VIMED STEMO is currently operating in that city in its emergency service system.
On-board stroke physicians can quickly evaluate, diagnose and treat the patient within the first hour of onset. Using 3G, 4G and satellite connectivity, VIMED(R) STEMO transmits fully-encrypted laboratory results, high-quality imaging and additional instruction to emergency rooms or trauma centers, greatly reducing time to treatment and possible outcome of patient disability resulting from stroke.
"With the technological solution realized in STEMO, we have got a fascinating mobile facility that has already proven its technological stability and clinical usefulness in hundreds of cases," said Prof. Heinrich Audebert of Charite-University Medicine and head of the Stroke-Emergency-Mobile consortium.
The NeuroLogica CereTom is a portable 8-slice CT scanner that delivers the highest quality perfusion scans on the market in real time, providing crucial information on blood flow and cardiac rhythm for treatment to clinicians in the ambulance.
"A large part of NeuroLogica's vision is to deliver high quality imaging to people and places around the world that otherwise would not have access to this life saving technology," said David Webster, vice president of Global sales and marketing at NeuroLogica. "The partnership between NeuroLogica and MEYTEC, resulting in the development of the comprehensive stroke ambulance, is a real-world fulfillment of that vision."
Edited by
Braden Becker
