A collaborative effort between Caltech and USC has birthed a new laser-based headset that offers a revolutionary noninvasive way to assess stroke risk by monitoring brain blood flow and volume. This breakthrough could profoundly change the way medical professionals evaluate and manage stroke risk.
A cutting-edge laser-based headset devised by a team of researchers from Caltech and the Keck School of Medicine of USC is poised to revolutionize the way stroke risk is assessed. This noninvasive device monitors changes in blood flow and volume in the brain, offering new hope for early detection and prevention of stroke, a condition that currently affects nearly 800,000 Americans each year.
The technology, which utilizes speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS), shines infrared light through the skull to measure blood flow in the brain. The changes in the light pattern, captured by a special camera, allow scientists to gauge blood vessel stiffness — a crucial indicator of stroke risk.
“Our optical technology to noninvasively measure blood flow is expected to be useful for a number of brain disease applications,” Changhuei Yang, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering and Medical Engineering at Caltech, said in a news release.
A Game-Changing Medical Tool
Until now, assessing stroke risk lacked a scalable, cost-effective test comparable to cardiac stress tests used to evaluate heart health.
“With this device, for the first time, we are going to have a way of knowing if the risk of someone having a stroke in the future is significant or not based on a physiological measurement,” co-lead author Simon Mahler, a postdoctoral scholar in Yang’s lab at Caltech, said in the news release.
The implications of this advancement are vast. Strokes, often triggered by the blockage or rupture of brain arteries, are the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the United States. Real-time, noninvasive monitoring of brain blood flow offers a proactive approach to managing and potentially reducing stroke occurrences.
Promising Study Results
In a study involving 50 participants, the device distinguished between those at low and high risk of stroke by measuring blood flow and volume while they held their breath — a task designed to stress the brain and reveal vascular resilience.
“These reactive measurements are indicative of vessel stiffness,” added Yang.
Participants at higher stroke risk exhibited faster blood flow but a lower volume of blood during the breath-holding exercise, highlighting the stiffness of their vessels.
“We can clearly see that the higher risk group has a higher flow-to-volume ratio, where they have faster flow but a lower volume of blood during breath holding,” Mahler added. This finding underscores the potential of the device to predict stroke risk with remarkable accuracy.
Looking Ahead
The team is now conducting extended trials to enhance the device’s data collection using machine learning and hopes to eventually incorporate it into routine clinical practice.
“We think this can really revolutionize the way stroke risk is assessed and will eventually help doctors determine if a patient’s risk is stable or worsening,” added Mahler.
This research, published in the journal Biomedical Optics Express, signifies a major leap forward in noninvasive brain health diagnostics and could lead to widespread use in prescreening for stroke and other brain diseases.
“If someone came in with an extremely high flow-to-volume ratio value, we might suspect that this person will have a stroke in the near future,” Mahler said.
By transforming the way medical professionals can assess and manage stroke risk, this laser-based headset has the potential to save countless lives and improve the quality of care for millions of patients worldwide.