Can a laser headband help prevent strokes?

A new device spots at-risk patients based on blood flow in the brain

Spotted: Around the world, 15 million people suffer from strokes – every year. At the moment, there is no cost-effective, scalable brain test that can evaluate a patient’s stroke risk, and physicians can only tend to identify at-risk patients by asking questions based on known contributing factors. Now, a device developed by a team of Caltech and USC researchers could offer a new way.

A stroke is caused by a blockage or rupture of an artery in the brain, which starves cells of oxygen and causes them to die rapidly. The team of engineers and scientists have created a headset device that monitors changes in a patient’s blood flow and volume, which can help doctors determine if a patient is at risk of experiencing a stroke.

The non-invasive prototype headband works by shining infrared laser light through the skull and into the brain while the patients holds their breath. This light gets scattered by blood flowing within blood vessels and bounces back, to be collected by a special camera.

How intense the returning light is compared with the original laser indicates how much blood flows through the brain’s blood vessels. The approach, called speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS), also takes into account the way light gets scattered. This technique shows how much a patient’s vessels expand and how fast the blood is flowing, which can then be used to determine a patient’s stroke risk level.

The team has already carried out a study using the prototype on 50 participants. Additional research is currently being conducted on patients in a hospital in California to gather further information from a larger population. Moving forward, the team also plans to using machine learning to enhance the technology’s data collection.

Written By: Jessica Wallis