EVOLVE Business and Professional Magazine August 2019 | Page 23

Halifax Health, the area’s only Comprehensive Stroke
Center, can now treat each stroke patient with
individualized care. Why is this important? Because when
you have a stroke, blood flow is blocked to your brain and
on average 32,000 brain cells die every second. Stroke
treatment, at most hospitals, involves medication to
destroy blood clots. In the past, treatment was decided by
determining the number of hours from the time of the
stroke to the time the patient got to the hospital.
Everyone’s brain is different and now we can personalize
care based on predictive modeling.
Physicians at Halifax Health have a new tool allowing for
individualized assessment of a patient’s stroke, based on
their unique physiology rather than passage of time.
Utilizing artificial intelligence computer algorithms,
Halifax Health Medical Center stroke specialists can
predict the viability of a patient’s brain tissue regardless
of the time of onset. This allows our physicians to
determine if there is living brain tissue that can be saved.
Our Interventional Radiologist will then use a device,
through a small incision in the leg, to remove the clot.
This new technology, a neuroimaging program, is called
RAPID ® . It uses a computer algorithm to analyze the
blood flow through the brain from CT or MRI images
and provides a very accurate prediction of how much of the
brain would benefit from restoring blood flow to it.
The software provides an objective analysis of how
patients benefit from intervention, regardless of the time
of stroke onset and thus, increases the chances of curing or
mitigating stoke injury. All in just two minutes.
How RAPID ® works
Green shows
predicted
amount of
brain at risk of
dying without
removing the
blood clot
Pink shows
predictive
amount of
brain that has
died
Light area
shows
amount of
dead brain
days later
after removing
the blood clot.
Live your life well.