Patients who are suffering from a stroke may no longer have to wait until arriving at a hospital to be treated. With Improving Treatment with Rapid Evaluation of Acute Stroke via Mobile Telemedicine, or iTREAT, physicians can diagnose stroke patients while the patient is being brought to the hospital.

The iTREAT is a system wherein a physician is virtually in the ambulance with the patient and an EMS member, and includes a tablet that is suction-mounted to the wall of the ambulance, and a portable modem and antenna.

“iTREAT is a research study,” said Dr. Andrew Southerland, who conducted the study and is the head of the University Health System, in the following video. “We are right now testing the feasibility of this method. This has not been done before using this type of equipment.”


“In this pilot study, we performed 27 ambulance runs using simulated stroke scenarios and patient actors,” Southerland told HCB News, and the researchers found that more than 90 percent of the test runs using the system had sufficient quality and audiovisual connectivity to perform the meeting between the patient and doctor.

The researchers also discovered that stroke results from a physician via iTREAT were 98 percent correlated with assessments that would have been conducted face-to-face, and according to the announcement, this would help in important decisions such as saving time in assessing the patient once at the hospital or whether the patient should be brought to a specialized care center or taken to the nearest hospital.

“Acute stroke is a very time-dependent illness,” Southerland said. “Specifically, in acute ischemic stroke, if you can remove the vascular obstruction and re-vascularize the injured part of the brain in a timely way, you can potentially prevent disability and death.”

Medication or an endovascular procedure are usually used to treat ischemic stroke and have to be administered as soon as possible, according to the announcement, and many stroke patients do not arrive at the hospital fast enough, so the ability to identify a stroke patient is crucial in treating them.

“Prior to implementing iTREAT in patient encounters, we spent over two years testing the broadband along ambulance routes and working with the UVA Center for Telehealth and local telecom providers to refine the system for clinical reliability,” he said.

Currently, the team is conducting a trial using real stroke patients with the goal of conducting a nationwide multi-center clinical trial.

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