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IIT Mandi, PGIMER researchers develop low-cost stroke detector device
Ischemic stroke caused by an insufficient or interrupted blood supply to part of the brain affects one of every 500 Indians every year
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi in collaboration with PGMIER Chandigarh have developed a portable and cost-effective device to detect and diagnose stroke caused by impaired blood flow to the brain.
A research study, describing the operation of the device, co-authored by Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury, associate professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT-Mandi, and research scholar Dalchand Ahirwar along with Dr Dheeraj Khurana, PGIMER, Chandigarh, was published in the IEE Sensors Journal recently.
Ischemic stroke caused by an insufficient or interrupted blood supply to part of the brain affects one of every 500 Indians every year.
Surveys have shown that around 10% to 15% of all strokes affect people below 40 years of age. The efficient management and treatment of stroke depend upon early identification and diagnosis, said Chowdhury.
He said currently magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computer tomography (CT) techniques are considered the gold standard for ischemic stroke detection.
While these are indeed reliable methods, they require considerable infrastructure and high cost and are inaccessible to many communities in India – there is only one MRI service for every 1 million people in the country, he said.
He said they were working on finding a low-cost diagnostic technique to precisely detect ischemic stroke at the point of care in rural, poor and remote areas.
“Our team has designed and developed a small wearable device that makes use of Near Infrared Spectroscopy to detect ischemic stroke,” he said.
Explaining further, he said, the device has a near-infrared light emitting diode (NIRS LED) which emits light in the range of 650 nm to 950 nm.
This light interacts with the coloured components of the blood like haemoglobin and provides information on blood characteristics such as regional oxygen saturation, regional oxygen consumption, and regional blood volume index.
Our team performed studies measuring the bio-markers under ischemic conditions at the forearm and the frontal lobe of the brain. The researchers also validated their detector prototype through experimental occlusion of the forearm and evoked ischemic stroke at the frontal lobe, and found excellent diagnostic potential.
Co-author of the research Dalchand Ahirwar said a combined matrix of this information reflects the temporal dynamics of blood haemoglobin, which can help in identifying impaired or abnormal blood flow conditions in local tissue.
The biomarkers that we have used to study ischemic conditions are oxygen saturation, regional oxygen consumption and regional blood volume index that could better predict ischemic conditions than other techniques, he said.
