An Exeter firm using AI to treat people with epilepsy has been given a £900,000 funding boost.
Neuronostics, a spin-out from the University of Exeter, will use the grant funding to develop a smartphone app that can identify risk of seizures.
The technology can be used in clinic and by patients at home.
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Dr Rohit Shankar MBE, grant co-applicant, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, and consultant Neuropsychiatrist Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said: “At present epilepsy is a condition that is challenging to diagnose and to treat.
"BioEP is an exciting technology that could rapidly and greatly advance diagnosis and management of seizures to improve overall patient outcomes. My team and I are looking forward to contributing to the clinical validation of this technology.
“These awards will help deliver an important milestone for the company and the BioEP technology, moving it closer to the point where it can directly benefit healthcare outcomes."
The funding is part of a £50million package of support for artificial intelligence in health and care by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Professor John Terry, co-founder of Neuronostics and Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow at the University of Birmingham, said: “ These awards will enable us to accelerate our product development, and importantly to clinically validate the performance of the BioEP seizure risk score.”
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Neuronostics will be involving epilepsy patients and medical staff as part of their research. Anyone interested in becoming involved is encouraged to get in touch via info@neuronostics.com for more information.
The first grant award, of £720,000 will enable the company, and academic and clinical partners from the Universities of Exeter and Birmingham, to build a prototype clinical platform, that uses mathematical models to provide a risk score of epilepsy using clinical EEG recordings.
In contrast to current clinical practice, where multiple recordings over many months are often needed to confirm a diagnosis of epilepsy, BioEP reveals the risk of epilepsy from the first recorded EEG with the same level of accuracy.
The second award, for £150,000 will support the development of a smart-phone app, capable of receiving data from a wireless EEG headset.
On board algorithms will extract relevant data segments which will be sent to Neuronostics cloud- based platform for analysis. The company believes this analysis will help clinicians understand whether a person with epilepsy is responding effectively to their medication.
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