Physicians at HonorHealth Research Institute in Scottsdale say more patients are surviving and recovering from the most common and severe form of brain stroke thanks to data-driven treatment. They've collected data on thousands of stroke patients over the past three years to do just that.
Dr. Shashvat Desai is a specialist in vascular and interventional neurology. He said brain strokes are the most common cause of preventable disability in the U.S. and more than 1 million Americans suffer from a new one every year.
For the past 10 years, doctors have been using a procedure called mechanical thrombectomy, which can reverse paralysis caused by stroke.
“Given that we have this very powerful treatment, the next step is to better understand which patients benefit the most from this treatment and which patients need more to be done from a research perspective to improve their outcomes," Desai said.
That's why HonorHealth created the HonorHealth Acute NeuroLogical Outcome (HALO) study.
Desai said HALO helps them monitor the quality of the treatment and optimize technique based on data points. For example, the blood clots that block arteries in the brain during a stroke look different depending on a patient’s ethnicity.
“White Caucasian patients have a different kind of blood clot compared to African American patients or compared to Native American populations, and this requires us to optimize our surgical technique," Desai said. "Having a large data base such as HALO allows us to fine tune the way we remove these blood clots."
Each HonorHealth stroke case produces more than 330 clinical, imaging and administrative data points that cover everything from age, sex, ethnicity and occupation to how the patient was evaluated, diagnosed, managed and eventually discharged. Such data has been collected about more than 3,000 HonorHealth stroke patients, leading to more than 1 million recorded variables.
“I think HALO may be the most comprehensive stroke database in the world," Desai said.
Programs similar to HALO are being developed at major stroke centers around the world. Desai said the data will be increasingly beneficial in an era of AI.
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