Neurosteer’s Breakthrough hdrEEG™ Reimagines EEG with Its Better, Faster Approach to Analyzing the Brain
Under the direction of signal processing expert Nathan Intrator, PhD, Neurosteer’s team has created an affordable and accessible device that measures minute electrical brain activity. Their device can help patients and providers manage brain conditions more effectively and proactively.
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Origin Story
The Neurosteer story begins with a resurrection. Or at least as close to one as you’ll likely hear about in medicine today.
Nathan Intrator, PhD, has been working as a researcher and professor in signal processing for two decades. He studied how the brain processes electrical signals, focusing on the inner sonar systems of bats and dolphins.
This work led Intrator to develop the initial hardware that could be affixed to an individual's forehead to directly measure electrical brain activity. Initially he focused on commercial applications such as studying pilots during flight simulation and students with ADHD. It was all very academic and lived within the confined world of Tel Aviv University, until the day he received a call about a man in a coma.
The woman on the phone explained to Intrator that her husband had been in a coma for five years. The doctors had given up hope, assuming he’d remain in a vegetative state forever. But the woman had read about Intrator’s research and thought maybe, just maybe, there was something there that could help.
She asked him if he would try out his device on her husband to see if any brain signals could be detected. Intrator responded to the challenge and was eager to see whether sensing the brain with just one EEG channel could provide valuable information in this case. After attaching the electrode strip to the man’s forehead, they could immediately see varying brain activity. More importantly, when the man’s wife spoke to him or they played his favorite music, the level of brain activity increased in meaningful ways.
Intrator was intrigued. He hadn’t yet had much experience with comatose patients, but he was seeing a significant level of specific brain activity. Something real was happening. Intrator speculated that the verbal and musical stimulation had a profound impact on the comatose brain. The wife, motivated by these findings, immediately jumped into action, asking people from their community to spend time with her comatose husband, reading to him, playing music, and finding other ways to stimulate his mind.
After about eight months, the man opened his eyes and woke up. He was able to speak, his mind was perfectly intact, and he was able to answer complex math questions (he was, after all, an engineer).
To the woman and her family, this felt like a miracle. To Intrator, it was a revelation, but for different reasons. It was proof that his technology had a potentially enormous role to play in healthcare. It wasn’t enough to use it in purely academic signal processing studies. A tool that offered highly accessible brain activity monitoring could save lives. It could help people understand and treat diseases and conditions of the brain and improve the quality of life for millions.
The Challenge
A fair question at this point was: Weren’t there already other effective ways to measure brain activity?
When measuring brain activity, we usually consider electroencephalography (EEG) or functional MRI (fMRI). EEG has been around for 100 years and involves having a technician spend about half an hour pasting 24-256 small electrodes on the surface of the scalp using a sticky conductive paste. Not particularly convenient or pleasant. EEG is also limited in what it can detect. In fact, according to Intrator, a traditional EEG could have missed the faint brain signals emitted by the man in the coma. For that signal detection level, patients would currently need one of the big medical scanners, such as an fMRI (which only measures blood flow as a proxy for brain activity rather than directly measuring electrical activity itself). However, such scanners are incredibly costly, labor intensive, and simply not practical. According to our healthcare system, minimal responsive patients (in coma) are not routinely tested with fMRI.
But let’s step back from the specialized case of the man in a coma and think about people with neurological disorders or those who have concerns about developing such conditions in the future. That’s millions of people globally, representing one of the fastest growing areas and, in the context of an aging population, critical areas of healthcare today.
People concerned about Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias face similar barriers to timely and disease-modifying treatment. They are sent to amyloid PET (a radioactive brain scanner) or to a CSF test (via an invasive spinal tap). While there may be blood-based biomarkers available in the near future, it is still not clear whether they will be sensitive enough at the very early stages of the disease, when disease modification therapy will be most effective. Also, blood biomarkers are not able to indicate whether there is also a risk for vascular dementia, a condition that does not allow therapy with the latest drugs.
What if a new system using affordable specialized hardware and automatic assessment based on the latest advances in digital signal processing, could offer people a fast, easy, noninvasive assessment of brain function? Intrator set out to answer that question by launching Neurosteer and building a strong and diverse team that could bring this new technology to market.
Under the Hood
The first thing to notice about Neurosteer’s wearable device is that it is small and portable. It consists of a disposable adhesive electrode strip that easily affixes to the forehead. The electrodes pick up the electrical brain activity and send the signals to a pocket-sized sensor, which then wirelessly transmits data to the cloud for signal processing and automatic assessment. The algorithms created for the device allow for rapid and highly advanced analysis of the brain signals, which are then displayed on a web-based dashboard and produce an assessment report.
When Intrator describes what makes Neurosteer’s signal processing unique, he uses the metaphor of a symphony orchestra. Specifically, you can listen closely and identify the sound of individual instruments.
Just as a symphony is played on different musical instruments, the symphony of brain wave activity plays out on a collection of what Intrator calls “functional neural networks.” Using Neurosteer’s digital signal processing, Neurosteer’s hdrEEG can distinguish the activity of the different networks in the same way a single human ear can distinguish between the instruments of an orchestra.
This is important as it enables looking at the whole “orchestra of the brain” by applying connectivity analysis between the different functional networks. Connectivity analysis performed with fMRI has shown changes a decade before symptoms of Alzheimer’s occur. Demonstrating timely detection of Alzheimer’s and later vascular dementia, based on functional connectivity changes, will be key milestones for Neurosteer.
Final Word
Neurosteer’s team is well on its way to redefining how we look at the management of brain health. The device has already received FDA Class II clearance. They’ve conducted several pilot clinical trials and are working on enhancing those trials to obtain additional FDA clearances for various neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's, vascular dementia, and Parkinson's. They have also published multiple peer-reviewed papers; in particular, their work on Parkinson's demonstrated the significance of their connectivity analysis. Additionally, they are exploring collaborations with research institutions and pharma to advance affordable patient screening.
By offering a more efficient and accessible method for brain assessment, Neurosteer seeks to empower individuals to proactively manage their brain health and receive timely interventions.
Neurosteer began changing lives the day Intrator used it to identify that a man in a coma still had signs of life. But Neurosteer is just getting started. Their advanced signal processing means scientists and physicians will gain a new understanding of the brain, which will have many positive benefits. For starters, it will most likely help optimize screening and neurostimulation, improve drug selection, and support more efficient clinical trials.
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Published: Aug 8, 2024