The Science behind
the Technology
Do you know how your brain is doing?
The science behind the NeuroCatch® Platform addresses this critical question with over 25 years of scientific discovery and development of the brain vital signs framework. NeuroCatch® enables a rapid, objective evaluation of brain activity, acquired using event-related potentials (ERPs), for sensitive and objective evaluation of cognitive function.
NeuroCatch® offers a scientific, evidence-based approach for the clinical utilization of ERPs. What are ERPs? ERPs are long-standing, extensively studied brain activity responses linked to cognitive function. These vital responses allow for objective evaluation of Auditory sensory, Basic attention, and Cognitive processing, which can be used to optimize individual brain health and guide brain care in conditions like brain injury, mental health disorders, and neurological diseases.
ERPs are a “brain fingerprint” of cognition. They have been rigorously studied and validated in over 150,000 medical publications. They increase the accuracy of existing subjective cognitive evaluations. They are sensitive to external factors such as sleep, stress, and fatigue/inattention[1]; yet they are impervious to user bias that attempts to hide the effects of a head injury, for instance.
to the NeuroCatch® Platform
- Advanced electroencephalography (EEG)
- Objective neurophysiological results
- Rapid and accessible cognitive assessment
- Event-related potentials, derived from EEG[1]
- ERPs track cognitive information processing[2]
- Auditory sensory processing
- Basic attention processing
- Cognitive processing
- Integrated software and hardware solution
- Automated acquisition, analysis, reporting, and management of results
- Rapid objective evaluation of cognitive function accessible to clinics
Unique to NeuroCatch® is the evidence-based method to stimulate specific brain responses involved in cognition. Using a rapid 6-minute simple auditory sequence of basic tones and word pairs it is possible to reliably determine the speed and size of these standard brain responses with millisecond resolution within an individual.
The results from NeuroCatch® are immediate and easy to use. They take complex neuroscience and translate it into simple brain health results. The clinical report is anchored by an intuitive graphic of cognitive brain health. Detailed results on the speed and size of the three different brain responses make up the ABCs of NeuroCatch® (below). The ABCs can be compared to standardized normative data to evaluate individual results.[3]
Evolution of
the Brain Vital Signs Scientific Framework and the NeuroCatch® Platform
The
Early Days
With the earliest evoked responses reported in 1939 and over 150,000 published studies in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed.gov database, the foundational work to ensure that ERP research advances could be made clinically accessible as an objective measure of cognitive function began in the mid-1990s. By the mid-2000s, numerous benchmarking studies were published in international peer-reviewed journals demonstrating that these ERPs could be linked to established clinical neuropsychological tests. Clinically, however, ERP testing remained inaccessible because of practical barriers. It was time-consuming, onerous, and required specialized expertise to understand the results, which were complex and not clinically standardized.
To move from a research laboratory procedure to a regulatory approved clinical test, the ERP procedure was translated in 2010 to a rapid, semi-automated, point-of-care test called the Halifax Consciousness Scanner or HCS. The HCS enabled proof-of-concept studies in acquired brain injury patients within numerous clinical settings, demonstrating that ERPs could be taken out of the research setting and be accessible for point-of-care.
Brain
Vital Signs
The concept of brain vital signs came from the realization that the progress in using ERPs at point-of-care created the opportunity to envision a vital sign framework for brain function. From 2010 to present, studies have demonstrated that it was possible to refine the prior HCS protocol to move to a standardized evaluation of the peak timing and amplitudes of the N100, P300, and N400 responses. These ERP responses were transformed into a clinical ABC framework and plotted on as a healthy, normal hexagon shape using a radar plot. The brain vital sign responses were reliably measured across age ranges and more sensitive than subjective, error-prone behavioural tests to detecting changes in healthy aging, concussion, sub-concussion, moderate-severe brain injury, dementia and other neurological and mental health conditions.
The NeuroCatch® Platform represents the technology implementation of brain vital sign research, which is fully automated to provide the highest quality, most accessible and advanced capabilities across a range of clinical points-of-care. NeuroCatch® is rigorously developed, tested, and regulatory approved for use in brain health and optimization.
