Stroke is the third most common cause of death in developed countries, exceeded only by coronary heart disease and cancer. Annually, 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke. Of these, 5 million die (one person every 9 minutes) and another 5 million are left permanently disabled, placing a large burden on family and community. Strokes are caused by a disturbance of blood supply to the brain; either the blood supply is blocked (ischemic stroke) or a blood vessel within the brain ruptures (haemorrhagic stroke). Medical imaging, such as CT, is of utmost importance for early diagnosis and choice of treatment. Moreover, advanced and faster decision making will substantially improve the quality of life of patients that suffered an acute stroke. Additionally, new treatment options for patients with acute stroke are expected to be developed. For clinicians, this will lead to a more complication decision-making process regarding the choice of treatment, meaning they need to be better informed. Computational support can almost instantly provide the required information accurately, illustrating the need for those computational decision support systems.
Nico-Lab BV, a spin-off company from the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) University of Amsterdam, aims to introduce a novel analysis toolbox which contains algorithms to automatically manage, quantify and analyse radiological images of acute stroke patients. This toolbox has the potential to strongly boost the image analysis field and minimise the burden of strokes. It consists of tailored algorithms to automatically analyse and quantify different aspects of neurovascular medical images
Nico-Lab BV is an ambitious and technologically advanced company. Its mission is to support clinicians worldwide in decision making to determine the choice of treatment for their acute strokes patients. Nico-lab will do so by providing innovative high performance algorithms that automatically analyse and quantify radiological images. Additionally, Nico-Lab can help researchers in trials with management of radiological images (cloud storage, online analysis, etc). Now, the next step is to take the toolbox from clinical trials into clinical practice, where the toolbox will support neuro-radiologists, neurologists, and neuro- surgeons in their decision making. In this SME phase I project Nico-Lab will therefore investigate the commercial feasibility of its valuable toolbox.
