Headband uses AI to help doctors diagnose seizures
AUSTIN, Texas – Matthew Hallahan, 21, had just moved to Austin, Texas, to take a job installing pools when he became unresponsive July 23.
The former high school lacrosse and football player from New Hampshire was supposed to help his mom unload her truck the day before, but he was complaining about a sinus infection.
That Sunday morning, Hallahan didn’t answer his mother’s call.
“I just got this really bad feeling,” Ann Marie Carpenter said. She found him at 7:15 a.m. in his apartment unresponsive and feverish. “He felt like a furnace.”
Hallahan became one of the first patients St. David’s Medical Center was able to diagnose with seizures and treat using a rapid electroencephalogram device that can be put on in minutes by a nurse. Ceribell’s headband device has 10 electrodes and snaps in place around the forehead to the back of the head.
Ceribell uses artificial intelligence to compare the patient’s brain waves with those of typical patients and with patients having seizures. It then alerts the staff to abnormal seizure activity. It also sends the readout of the patient’s brain waves in real time using Wi-Fi to a neurologist to read the EEG. Ceribell’s latest AI software, ClarityPro, was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in August.
Hallahan had two different bacterial infections, including meningitis. Doctors did emergency brain surgery to relieve the pressure in his skull and try to get rid of the bacteria.
Four days later, he had a stroke. Then he started having seizures.
Emily Durham, the charge nurse at the St. David’s intensive care unit the night Hallahan began having seizures, said the Ceribell device notified the staff of seizures they didn’t know he was having, as well as showing whether the medication Hallahan received was stopping the seizures.
Before having the device, Durham would have had to contact the EEG tech on call. “I can just run to the backroom and put it on,” she said of the headband, which can be worn for 24 hours.
Hallahan’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Craig Kemper, likens seizures to the brain firing off like a heart arrhythmia. Uncontrolled seizures can be fatal, so time is of the essence.
A regular EEG can take days to finish, but “this gives us an answer in about 10 minutes,” Kemper said.
This is helpful for patients who are having convulsive seizures that are not visible. Seizures are difficult to diagnose visually in critically ill patients under medication to paralyze them while on a ventilator in an ICU.
The Ceribell can be authenticated using a traditional EEG, which Kemper said “is still the gold standard.”
Once Hallahan’s seizures were under control, doctors focused on the cause: the bacterial infection. They discovered Aug. 5 that Hallahan had polyps, a deviated septum and a bone spur in his nose that needed correcting because bacteria were collecting in his nose and going back into his brain.
By Aug. 8, Hallahan was able to say his name. By Aug. 12, he was able to sit in a chair. The next day, he started walking, “and we went from there,” Carpenter said. Hallahan was able to go to inpatient rehab Aug. 17 and then home a week later.