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Abstract
Purpose Physicians must quickly evaluate stroke patients to determine if they're eligible for time-sensitive treatment and prompt diagnosis and treatment of cerebral stroke patients are essential to their recovery. With the increasing demand for such management of stroke, telemedicine's role of coordinating timely the efforts of a stroke team became important. We developed “i-Stroke” system in Japan to access rapidly diagnostic images and clinical information.
Methods This system was made on the basis of transferring patient data, images and movie (Angio and/or Operating room) between hospital systems and participating medical staffs in and out of the hospital, through their standard, currently utilized mobile devices (iPhone, Andorid). The system is able to transfer clinical data, CT, MR, echo, angiographic and intraoperative images and expert opinion in real time. It provides also tools for management of diagnostic and treatment information, even such as simple calculation of appropriate drug dosage, modified Rankin Scale and perfusion diffusion mismatch.
Results A pilot application of the system in our hospital showed adequate performance and proper information transfer, resulting in proper diagnosis and management of all stroke patients. The i-Stroke system was introduced at our institution in August 2010, for communication with our affiliated hospitals and over 100 “i-stroke” call were initiated until the end of February 2012.
Conclusions The “i-stroke” system proved to be efficient for appropriate standard management in most time demanding treatments of stroke. It is our belief that adoption of this software with handheld terminals will make it possible to help and save the lives of more patients who suffer cerebral stroke.
Competing interests H Takao: FUJIFILM Co. Ltd. Y Murayama: FUJIFILM Co. Ltd. T Ishibashi: None. I Yuki: None. K Karagiozov: None. T Abe: None.
