More than 400,000 military personnel have suffered at least one traumatic brain injury in the last two decades. Long-term consequences for patients may have been better if doctors could more quickly have diagnosed the situation and treated it.
Now there appears to be a solution and it involves the Norwood company Sense Neuro Diagnostics.
The NeuroHawk can scan the brain in 2.5 seconds and determine what is going on. This is important because there aren’t any CT scanners or MRIs on the battlefield. And for every minute a patient goes untreated, millions of brain cells die.
"It's like a bike helmet, almost, that fits around the skull," says the company's Dr. George Shaw, who helped to develop the device. "One antenna transmits a radio frequency signal and the other eight receive that signal."
The Defense Department and the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) have given Sense Neuro Diagnostics $2.43 million to develop a prototype and study the device in the field.
"They were very excited about what we had to offer because they don't have a device in order to do this for the soldiers," Sense CEO Geoff Klass says.
Applications Beyond The Battlefield
The NeuroHawk also is being studied in the hospital and can be used by EMTs. That includes EMS-field assessment for ambulance use in determining stroke activity and NeuStat-continuous hospital monitoring.
Sense Neuro Diagnostics says it hopes to bring the three devices to market in the next three years. The military contract is for 18 months.
