RAPID Imaging Platform Powers Mobile Stroke Units

Menlo Park, Calif. —November 29, 2018 — iSchemaView, the worldwide leader in advanced imaging for stroke, today announced that the RAPID imaging platform is now fully compatible with the imaging hardware in use in Mobile Stroke Units (MSU). RAPID is the imaging solution of choice for the mobile stroke unit of Houston’s Memorial Hermann Healthcare System — the very first MSU in the nation.

The Mobile Stroke Unit is a specialized ambulance for prehospital stroke treatment, which provides the diagnostic tools and stroke expertise to enable therapeutic treatment at the site of the emergency. When treated in a Mobile Stroke Unit, patients can be evaluated, imaged and treated before they are transported via ambulance to the emergency department, and data suggests that prehospital treatment can save a critical hour — almost doubling the odds of a patient being discharged directly to home after their stroke. It is expected that patients treated on the MSU will have fewer long-term disabilities, providing them with a better quality of life and potentially reducing overall healthcare costs.

“This novel model for delivering acute stroke treatment is advancing stroke care in Houston and has the potential for broad impact across the nation,” said Dr. James Grotta, Director of Stroke Research for the Clinical Institute for Research and Innovation at the Memorial Hermann–Texas Medical Center and Director of the Mobile Stroke Unit Consortium. “iSchemaView’s RAPID is an important tool to speed our ability to properly triage patients.”

Since 2014, the number of Mobile Stroke Units in the United States has grown to more than 17, with three additional units soon to become operational. RAPID is compatible with all MSUs, regardless of hardware solution.

“Our research at UCLA shows that in a typical stoke where there is a large vessel occlusion, two million brain cells die for every minute that goes by without treatment, underscoring just how critical a rapid response to stroke is,” said Dr. May Nour, Medical Director of the UCLA Arline and Henry Gluck Stroke Rescue Program. “We are looking forward to bringing RAPID into our Mobile Stroke Unit — the first of its kind in the Western U.S. This added level of imaging analysis will lead to more efficient diagnosis and triage of patients requiring routing to advanced stroke centers directly from the field.”

Developed by leading stroke experts, RAPID combines unmatched expert feature extraction, proprietary algorithms and machine learning to deliver the best-in-class platform, which includes tools for CT perfusion, MR diffusion and perfusion, CT angiography and CT ASPECT scoring. RAPID modules feature custom notifications, custom thresholding, hypoperfusion and cerebral blood volume indexes and golden hour thresholds. And RAPID is the only system which delivers results to mobile devices in less than 90 seconds, whether by email or hospital PACS.