Project Background

One of the projects I am most excited about is our work on using pre-hospital EEG to support stroke triage.

Right now, EMS providers usually rely on behavioral assessments (like BEFAST or similar scales) to guess whether a patient might be having a large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke. These tools are fast and low-cost, but they do not capture what is actually happening in the brain.

For LVO strokes, every minute matters. If a patient is first taken to a hospital that cannot perform the right intervention, they need to be transferred, which can add hours of delay and drastically reduce their chances of functional independence.

Our Team’s Research

Our team is exploring whether a portable EEG system, paired with smart but interpretable analytics, could give EMS:

• a quick read on patterns associated with LVO,
• guidance on whether to route directly to a comprehensive stroke center, and
• more confidence in their triage decisions without slowing them down in the field.

I am especially interested in how we can design this system so it is:

• affordable enough for wider deployment,
• usable under real EMS constraints (time pressure, noise, motion), and
• transparent so clinicians trust what it is telling them.