Monitoring neurological signals to detect potential disorders: Key neurotech patent #44

– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 8,187,181

Today we fea­ture an impor­tant Medtron­ic patent. (As men­tioned, we are dis­cussing foun­da­tion­al Per­va­sive Neu­rotech patents, from old­er to new­er by issue date)

U.S. Patent No. 8,187,181: Scor­ing of sensed neu­ro­log­i­cal sig­nals for use with a med­ical device system

• Assignee(s): Medtron­ic, Inc.
• Inventor(s): Ivan Oso­rio, Mark G. Frei, Nina M. Graves, Jonathon E. Giftakis
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Neuro-monitoring
• Issue Date: May 29, 2012

SharpBrains’ Take:

While some events caused by neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders are read­i­ly appar­ent, oth­er unde­sir­able neu­ro­log­i­cal activ­i­ty may still occur but be less vis­i­ble with the patient not exhibit­ing symp­toms. Such activ­i­ty may go unde­tect­ed and result in dis­or­ders wors­en­ing due to lack of treat­ment. The ‘181 patent describes tech­niques for detect­ing, rank­ing and pre­sent­ing neu­ro­log­i­cal events of vary­ing sever­i­ty, in some cas­es enabling more sub­tle afflic­tions to be dis­cerned. A spec­i­fi­ca­tion span­ning 33 illus­tra­tion sheets and 22 pages of writ­ten mate­r­i­al dis­clos­es var­i­ous aspects of detect­ing fea­tures of such events includ­ing iden­ti­fy­ing the sever­i­ty of activ­i­ty based on the inten­si­ty, dura­tion or spread­ing of neur­al clus­ter­ing activ­i­ty (see illus­tra­tive image above). The impor­tance of the addressed prob­lem space, inde­pen­dent claim cov­er­age of the inven­tive con­cept, exten­sive spec­i­fi­ca­tion and 80+ for­ward cita­tions are among that con­tribute to mak­ing the ‘181 patent as a key non-inva­sive neu­rote­chol­o­gy patent.

Abstract:

A med­ical device sys­tem capa­ble of scor­ing a sever­i­ty of sensed neu­ro­log­i­cal sig­nals relat­ing to a ner­vous sys­tem dis­or­der. The sys­tem com­pris­es a mon­i­tor­ing ele­ment that receives a neu­ro­log­i­cal sig­nal hav­ing at least one event to be scored. The med­ical device sys­tem iden­ti­fies one or more fea­tures of the neu­ro­log­i­cal sig­nal to use in scor­ing and com­putes a score of rel­a­tive sever­i­ty of the event using the iden­ti­fied fea­ture. Once two or more events have been scored, the events may be ranked by sever­i­ty rel­a­tive to each other.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 12. A com­put­er-imple­ment­ed method for deter­min­ing the sever­i­ty of a detec­tion clus­ter comprising:

1. deter­min­ing using a proces­sor that one or more sensed neu­ro­log­i­cal sig­nals rep­re­sent a plu­ral­i­ty of detec­tion clusters;
2. iden­ti­fy­ing using a proces­sor at least one fea­ture of each of the detec­tion clusters;
3. com­put­ing using a proces­sor a rel­a­tive sever­i­ty score for each of the detec­tion clus­ters using the iden­ti­fied at least one fea­ture; and
4. rank­ing using a proces­sor the plu­ral­i­ty of detec­tion clus­ters by sever­i­ty using the rel­a­tive sever­i­ty scores.

To learn more about mar­ket data, trends and lead­ing com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal brain health space –dig­i­tal plat­forms for brain/ cog­ni­tive assess­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and enhance­ment– check out this mar­ket report. To learn more about our analy­sis of 10,000+ patent fil­ings, check out this IP & inno­va­tion neu­rotech report.