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Our smartphone screening tool can help detect strokes faster and lead to faster treatment

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In Australia, stroke is one among the leading causes of death and long-term disability. Some 5% deaths are attributable to stroke, while strokes cost money to the Australian healthcare system AUD 6.2 billion annually.

Strokes occur when there’s a sudden lack of blood flow within the brain. This prevents brain tissue from getting the oxygen and nutrients it needs, which can lead to damage to parts of the brain.

Timely stroke treatment can reduce brain damage and improve patient outcomes. However, this relies on early recognition of symptoms, which just isn’t at all times easy.

Our team has developed a brand new smartphone app that can check an individual’s facial features and detect whether or not they are having a stroke. We recently published the outcomes of study A pilot study this tool and found that it could quickly and relatively accurately discover whether someone had had a stroke.

Facial expression scanning

One of the earliest outward symptoms of a stroke is a facial features, comparable to drooping, when one side of the mouth just isn’t activated when the person tries to smile.

However, paramedics responding to emergencies and hospital emergency ward stroke cases are sometimes neglected by staff. Facial expressions naturally vary from person to person, and recognizing subtle changes in high-stress environments is difficult. This could also be even tougher if the patient is from a unique ethnic or cultural background.

With our smartphone app, a paramedic or other first aider asks the patient to try to smile and “films” the patient’s face while she or he does so. The AI-powered model then analyzes the video footage to search for symptoms similar to those who doctors use to discover a stroke, namely asymmetrical mouth drooping.

Guilherme Camargo de Oliveira (right) demonstrates the face checker with Nemuel Daniel Pah.
Seamus Daniel from RMIT University

The application has been designed with simplicity in mind – just point the camera on the patient and press the button. To ensure patient privacy, the video is analyzed in real time and doesn’t require storage. This device would only require a smartphone, so it could be easy to implement and can be a cheap solution.

The idea is that first responders, comparable to paramedics or emergency department nurses, can have this app on their smartphones. When they first see a patient who has experienced a medical emergency, they can use the app inside seconds to detect whether the patient could have suffered a stroke. In this manner, treatment can be accelerated accordingly.

Our pilot study

We tested the tool on a small dataset, using video recordings of 14 individuals who had experienced a stroke and 11 healthy controls.

We found that it was 82% accurate, meaning it appropriately identified stroke 82% of the time. Our tool doesn’t replace comprehensive clinical stroke diagnostic testing, however it can help discover individuals who need treatment far more quickly and assist clinicians.

Dinesh Kumar explains the tool.

Although these results are promising, we plan to further optimize the model. We hope that accuracy will improve as a bigger dataset is created that features recordings from more patients.

At this stage, the AI ​​model has only been trained and developed on a small dataset, and the info lacks diversity by way of ethnicity and demographics. It can be obligatory to refine and test the applying for people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

In the longer term, we plan to cooperate with doctors, emergency departments and ambulance services to conduct clinical trials. We will need to test the effectiveness of this tool within the hands of real users, comparable to paramedics, to confirm that it helps them look after patients.

This article was originally published on : theconversation.com
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Health and Wellness

WATCH: Cynthia Erivo on the importance of being a sister – Essence

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This article was originally published on : www.essence.com
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Health and Wellness

Phenergan is no longer recommended for children under 6 years of age due to the risk of hallucinations. Here’s what you can use instead

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The Australian Drugs Regulatory Authority has issued an order safety warning over Phenergan and related products containing the antihistamine promethazine.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has stated that over-the-counter products shouldn’t be given to children under six years of age due to concerns about serious unwanted side effects akin to hyperactivity, aggression and hallucinations. Breathing may turn into slow or shallow, which can be fatal.

When high doses are administered to young children, difficulties in learning and understanding, including reversible cognitive deficit and mental disability, may occur. – said the TGA.

The latest warning follows international and Australian concerns about the drug in young children, which is commonly used to treat conditions akin to hay fever and allergies, motion sickness and for short-term sedative effects.

What is promethazine?

Promethazine is a “first generation” antihistamine that has been sold over the counter in Australian pharmacies for a long time for a spread of conditions.

Unlike many other drugs, first-generation antihistamines can cross the blood-brain barrier. This means they affect your brain chemistry, making you feel drowsy and sedated.

In adults, this will likely be useful for sleep. However, in children, these drugs can cause serious unwanted side effects on the nervous system, including those mentioned on this week’s safety alert.

We’ve known about this for a while

We have known about the serious unwanted side effects of promethazine in young children for a while.

Advice regarding 20 years ago In the United States, the drug was not recommended for use in children under two years of age. In 2022, an Australian Medicines Advisory Committee made its own suggestion to increase the age to six. New Zealand released similar warnings and advice in May this 12 months.

Over the last ten years, there have been 235 cases of serious unwanted side effects from promethazine in each children and adults reported to the TGA. Of the 77 deaths reported, one was a toddler under six years of age.

Reported unwanted side effects in each adults and children included:

  • 13 cases of accidental overdose (leading to 11 deaths)
  • eight cases of hallucinations
  • seven cases of slow or shallow respiration (leading to 4 deaths)
  • six cases of decreased consciousness (leading to five deaths).

TGA security alert comes after an internal investigation by the manufacturer of Phenergan, Sanofi-Aventis Healthcare. This investigation was initiated in 2022 advice from the Medicines Advisory Committee. The company has now updated its information for consumers and healthcare professionals.

What can you use instead?

If you have allergies or hay fever in young children, non-sedating antihistamines akin to Claratine (loratadine) or Zyrtec (cetirizine) are preferred. They provide relief without the risk of sedation and other disturbing unwanted side effects of promethazine.

If symptoms of a chilly or cough occur, parents must be reassured that these symptoms will normally subside with time, fluid intake, and rest.

Saline nasal sprays, adequate hydration, a humidifier or elevating the child’s head can relieve the congestion related to hay fever. Oral products containing phenylephrine marketed for nasal congestion must be avoided because evidence shows that this is the case This article was originally published on : theconversation.com

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Health and Wellness

Why Elon Musk’s Grok Could Pose a Threat to Medical Privacy

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elon musk, DEI, remote work, jobs


Owner of X and candidate for the White House cabinet Elon Musk asked users to submit MRI results, CT scans and other medical information to its AI chatbotGrok reviewed it and a few people fell for it, he reports.

Musk presented this concept to X in late October 2024.

“Try uploading X-rays, PET, MRI, or other medical images to Grok for analysis. It’s still early stages, but it’s already quite accurate and will be extremely good,” he wrote. “Let us know where Grok is doing it right or where it needs work.”

Some individuals who voluntarily submitted photos were comfortable that Grok “did do well” together with his blood test results and breast cancer detection, but others waved red flags against the platform.

Josh Sharp, who goes by @showinvestment on social media, identified how a broken collarbone was viewed as a dislocated shoulder.

Radiologist Docteur TJ provided an in-depth evaluation of the MRI image, which he described partially as “too gross.”

Another example is a robot confusing a mammogram of a benign breast cyst with a picture of the testicles.

Grok was launched in May 2024 after raising $6 billion in an investment financing round through Musk’s tech startup, xAI. Grok is just not the primary of its kind: Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT also enable the transfer of medical images.

While some praise the technology’s potential advances, medical privacy experts don’t not on this camp.

“It’s very personal data, and there’s no telling exactly what Grok will do with it,” said Vanderbilt University biomedical informatics professor Dr. Bradley Malin, according to “Sending personal information to Grok is more like, ‘Whee!’ Let’s throw out this data and hope the corporate does what I need it to do.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects medical information shared with physicians or in a patient portal because federal guidelines protect it from being shared without consent. However, the protection doesn’t cover social networking sites – it only applies to doctor’s offices, hospitals, health insurers and a few firms they work with.


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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