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An injured brain needs to come under appropriate care as quickly as possible. Faster treatment leads to less brain damage and a faster recovery for the patient. Minutes of delay can make the difference between lifelong disablement and an independent life.
To accurately screen patients with suspected brain injury, such as stroke or due to trauma, and differentiate patients with severe injuries acutely requiring specialized care, would reduce both mortality and societal cost.

Treatment for stroke patients include clot-dissolving medication and surgical removal of the clot. Both these treatments need to be initiated within few hours after stroke onset, and only after the diagnose has been ensured and bleeding in the brain excluded. Today, too few stroke victims are eligible for adequate treatment due to delayed diagnosis. By streamlining pre-hospital stroke management and reducing time to diagnosis the clinical outcome of stroke may improve dramatically.

Traumatic brain injury can be anything from diffuse damage, concussion or intracranial hematomas with clinical severity from minor to virtually un-survivable injuries. It can be caused by road traffic accidents or falls at home in the aging population. Patients with intracranial hematoma need rapid transfer to definite care for urgent neurosurgical decompression. In reality, many patients with severe injuries are transported to non-trauma centres and later needing transfer to trauma centres, which is associated with substantially higher mortality than a direct transport. By improving pre-hospital screening of patients requiring specialized care at trauma centres, mortality would decrease and outcome improve for these patients.

There is a need for development of new technology as alternative to high cost imaging devices within several areas in the medical field. Besides injury in the brain, microwave technology has several promising applications with great potential.  Microwave technology has demonstrated greater contrast between healthy and diseased tissue, a property to be used in the development of new, cost effective, imaging devices.
Finding and developing novel medical applications of microwave technology is a focus for research groups at Chalmers, led by Medfield’s founders Mikael Persson and Andreas Fhager. The ability to use microwave technology for imaging solutions is a major interest for the groups.