Early Assessment of Acute Ischemic Stroke in Rabbits Based on Multi-Parameter Near-Field Coupling Sensing

Abstract

Background: Maintaining normal supply of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and preventing secondary damage caused by acute ischemic stroke (AIS) are essential to the treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. Nevertheless, there hasn’t been fully accepted method targeting continuous assessment of AIS in clinical. Methods: Near-field coupling (NFC) sensing can obtain the electromagnetic properties related to the volume of intracranial components with advantages of noninvasiveness, strong penetrability and real-time monitoring. In this work, we built a multi-parameter monitoring system that is able to measure the phase and amplitude changes in electromagnetic wave reflection and transmission. For investigating its feasibility in AIS detection, sixteen rabbits were chosen to establish AIS models by bilateral common carotid artery ligation and then were enrolled for monitoring experiments.Results: During the six hours after AIS, the reflection amplitude (RA) shows a decline trend with a range of 0.69dB and reflection phase (RP) has an increased variation of 6.48°. Meanwhile, transmission amplitude (TA) and transmission phase (TP) decrease 2.14dB and 24.29° respectively. The statistical analysis illustrates that before ligation, three hours after ligation and six hours after ligation can be effectively distinguished by the four parameters individually. When all those parameters are regarded as recognition features in BP network, the classification accuracy of the three different periods reaches almost 100%.Conclusion: These results prove the feasibility of multi-parameter NFC sensing to assess AIS, which is promised to become an outstanding point-of-care testing method in the future.