MedyMatch Technology and Samsung NeuroLogica have teamed up to help paramedics and EMTs more quickly and accurately assess stroke patients in prehospital environments.

By integrating MedyMatch's artificial intelligence technology into ambulance-based mobile stroke units equipped with Samsung NeuroLogica's CereTom computed tomography scanner, the companies say first responders can more easily use CT scans to determine whether a patient is suffering from a blood clot or hemorrhage.

Faster patient assessment can enable caregivers to follow the most appropriate treatment path, ideally while in transit to the hospital. Nearly 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year, most of them caused by clot obstruction in the brain.

Such ischemic strokes can be treated with a tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, but it must be administered within three hours. It can take an hour after a stroke patient arrives in the ED to receive treatment because of the time needed to determine which kind of stroke the patient is having.

The AI integration, which is pending regulatory approval, could buy valuable time on the way to the hospital, sending images to a cloud-based server where machine learning technology can be applied to help determine where the bleeding is occurring.