Deans' stroke musings: Automated and Quantitative Assessment of Tactile Mislocalization After Stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Automated and Quantitative Assessment of Tactile Mislocalization After Stroke

We don't fucking care about your description of a stroke problem. We want solutions. WHEN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO PROVIDE THEM?

Automated and Quantitative Assessment of Tactile Mislocalization After Stroke

Mike D. Rinderknecht¹^*,

Julio A. Dueñas¹,

Jeremia P. Held^2,3,

Olivier Lambercy¹,

Fabio M. Conti⁴,

Leopold Zizlsperger^2,3,

Andreas R. Luft^2,3,

Marie-Claude Hepp-Reymond⁵ and

Roger Gassert¹

¹Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
²Division of Vascular Neurology and Neurorehabilitation, Department of Neurology, University of Zurich and University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
³Cereneo, Center for Neurology and Rehabilitation, Vitznau, Switzerland
⁴Clinica Hildebrand Centro di Riabilitazione Brissago, Brissago, Switzerland
⁵Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Topesthesia, the recognition of tactile stimulation location on the skin, can be severely affected by neurological injuries, such as stroke. Despite topesthesia being crucial for manipulating objects and interacting with the environment during activities of daily living, deficits cannot be quantitatively captured with current clinical assessments and are, as a consequence, not well-understood. The present work describes a novel automated assessment tool for tactile mislocalization in neurological patients with somatosensory deficits. We present two cases of ischemic stroke patients, describe their tactile localization deficits with the automated assessment, and compare the results to a standard manual clinical assessment. Using the automated assessment tool, it was possible to identify, locate, precisely quantify, and depict the patients' deficits in topesthesia. In comparison, the clinical assessment was not sensitive enough and some deficits would remain undetected due to ceiling effects. In addition, an MRI structural analysis of the lesion supported the existence of somatosensory deficits. This novel and quantitative assessment may not only help to raise awareness of the implications of deficits in topesthesia, but would also allow monitoring recovery throughout the rehabilitation process, informing treatment design, and objectively evaluating treatment efficacy.