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New medical test may improve efficiency of aneurysm detection

Category: General Health

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have developed a new medical test that may be able to help radiologists detect aneurysms with greater speed and accuracy.

In collaboration with IBM, the Mayo Clinic has developed a technology that combines advanced imaging with analytics, a method that has been proven to be 95 percent accurate in detecting aneurysms. The established manual interpretation system is only accurate in 70 percent of cases.

The traditional method used to detect a brain aneurysm involves an invasive test that injects dye into the body, a procedure that is associated with a high risk of neurological complications.

The new automated imaging machine is capable of detecting aneurysms in three to five minutes, leading to quicker diagnosis and improved efficiency.

"Our joint work with Mayo Clinic on this project [enables] us to remove some of the time and efficiency barriers and making imaging an even more valuable preventative screening tool," said Bill Rapp, IBM's CTO of healthcare and life sciences.

"Enabling broad access to this capability via cloud delivery is the natural next step," he added.