Chongqing- How to distinguish cerebral hemorrhage from cerebral infarction in the early stage? Doctors from a Chongqing hospital can identify whether a stroke patient has a hemorrhage or an infarction at the onset of the stroke or in the ambulance, making a worldwide breakthrough in stroke diagnosis.

This comes from the National Key Research and Development Program of Research and Application of Non-invasive Cerebral Edema Dynamic Monitor for Clinical Standardization, led by Professor Feng Hua and Associate Professor Hu Rong, Directors of Neurosurgery at the Southwest Hospital of Army Medical University. The program was completed after more than three-year of technical and clinical trials.

Stroke is a sudden disorder of cerebrovascular circulation and is the leading cause of death and disability among Chinese adults.

There are 3.3 million new stroke cases in China every year, with an incidence of about 246.8 per 100,000 people. The most common is cerebral infarction, with an incidence of 70%, caused by the presence of blood clots blocking blood flow and resulting in cerebral ischemia; the other category is cerebral hemorrhage, mostly caused by ruptured blood vessels.

“There are different treatments for cerebral infarction and cerebral hemorrhage,” said Hu. The cerebral infarction needs to take intravenous thrombolytic therapy, and the golden treatment time is generally no more than 4.5 hours; cerebral hemorrhage is best within 24 hours for embolism treatment.

Hu said, either way, the earlier treatment is, the better, which can effectively reduce mortality and disability rate.

Non-invasive cerebral edema dynamic monitor

The project aims at the key technique of ultra-early differential stroke diagnosis by establishing an integrated technology solution for the ultra-early differential diagnosis and condition monitoring of acute stroke types with the self-developed non-invasive brain edema monitor as the core.

Specifically, the non-invasive cerebral edema dynamic monitor works extremely well on detecting the diseases, especially for edema, hematoma, hydrocephalus, brain tumors, and other such diseases.

The monitor looks like a thickened laptop, easy to carry, and the doctor can switch it on and put four pieces of cranial special electrode pieces onto the patient's head. The electromagnetic perturbation technology begins to test the impedance of the brain tissue then.

“You can observe that there are three colors on the screen, where the white range with a disturbance coefficient of 120 to 160 is normal; blue is hemorrhage and red is infarction,” said the relevant responsible person.

The equipment can identify whether a patient has a hemorrhage or an infarction at the beginning of the stroke, even at the onset of the disease or at the ambulance, to improve the existing detection techniques for cerebral lesions.

(Du Min, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)