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Philadelphia Medical Software Startup Aims To Bridge ‘Neurologist Gap’

Smaller hospitals don’t always have a neurologist on duty around the clock to read patients’ EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain. But a startup based at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia wants to change that.

Co-founder and president Joe Camaratta said it can help reduce a patients stay.

“Timely treatment of critical care patients suffering from seizures really helps to reduce their length of stay in an ICU setting.”

But the dearth of specialists like neurologists at community and rural hospitals means there may not be someone on hand to interpret that test.

That’s where BioSignal Analytics and its AutoEEG come in, Camaratta said.

“The technology for doing this is very similar to the technology that runs Siri in your iPhone — speech recognition technology. You have a series of waveforms and or signals that come in and you interpret those signals and make words out of them,” he said. “That’s not much different than what you see in an EEG: it’s a series of signals that come in, and there are certain patterns of signals which denote bad things.”

Combined with a database of 20,000 EEGs collected from Temple University Hospital, the software algorithm is trained to differentiate between seizures and patient motion or machinery interference. It can free clinicians from alarm fatigue; for patients, it can mean less-expensive care and a faster recovery.

BioSignal Analytics hopes to be in hospitals over the next few years.

Media Contact:

Kristen Fitch

Kristen Fitch

Senior Director, Marketing