Nordic Life Science 1
Timo Koskela, Eero Väyrynen, Ilkka Juuso and Jukk
a Kortelainen Dr Jukka Kortelainen was doing his residency at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at Oulu University Hospital. His work included research with intensive care patients and he realized how little we knew about the brain function of these patients. Brain monitoring has been complicated and not well-suited to the intensive care area where clinical evaluation might be difficult due to the disease, or sedation, and where no reliable laboratory tests are available to measure brain function. In addition, the information provided by imaging, such as CT or MRI, is also limited and transferring the patient for these examinations is time consuming and laborious. One of the few and best ways to measure brain function in an intensive care unit is electroencephalogram (EEG), but its application here is limited. One reason is the practical difficulties in carrying out the measurement, but this part of the problem is about to be solved as several easy-to-setup solutions suitable for intensive care with minimal training have entered the market. Another reason is that intensive care personnel usually are inexperienced in interpreting the EEG, and getting an opinion from an EEG expert might be difficult or impossible, leading to compromised treatment of the patient. Together with his colleague, Eero Väyrynen, an artificial intelligence specialist also from the University of Oulu, Kortelainen started to develop a solution to this problem. The goal was to create a technology that would provide EEG measurements in an easy-to-interpret form. The two researchers carried out a pilot study with comatose cardiac arrest patients, in collaboration with Oulu University Hospital. They found that specific EEG features revealed healthy brain function despite the patients being unconscious and sedated.