U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bradley Dengler, the neurosurgery consultant to the Army Surgeon General, with Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, shows Col. Jessica Peck, the command surgeon for 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, how to use the i-Stat Alinity at LRMC, Germany on May 21. The device is a portable blood analyzer used to detect traumatic brain injures and delivers real-time, lab-quality diagnostic test results. U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jacob Kohrs
July 16 (UPI) — U.S. Army medics in Europe said Thursday they are testing a new handheld diagnostic tool that can identify traumatic brain injuries in as little as 15 minutes.
Military officials predicted the new i-STAT Alinity device, made by Abbott Laboratories, can revolutionize the way medics can detect and treat such injuries quickly in the battlefield environment.
Rather than traditional methods of assessing brain injury or concussion by making subjective judgements based on questioning patients, the new device can yield objective information by measuring unique biomarkers that are present in the blood of the injured.
Lt. Col. Bradley Dengler, the neurosurgery consultant to the Army Surgeon General and director of the Military Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative at the Uniformed Services University, said the development of the i-STAT Alinity is a game-changer.
“This is probably the single most important advancement in traumatic brain injury care in the last 15 to 20 years,” he said in an Army release. “Historically, we’ve missed a lot of these injuries.”
Abbott Labs received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to use the device with whole blood two years ago. The company says it allows doctors to help assess patients with suspected concussion at the bedside and obtain “lab-quality” results in 15 minutes.
Prior to that, the tests were only cleared for use with plasma or serum, requiring samples to be sent to a lab for processing and testing.
With that approval, the Army is now integrating the devices into air defense forward units under 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command. These units were judged to be among the most likely to benefit from the devices because they often operate in far-flung locations, hours away from advanced medical facilities and sophisticated brain scanners.
The i-Stat device measures two biomarkers from the brain that may be released into the bloodstream indicating a possible brain injury — ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase L1, or UCH-L1, and glial fibrillary acidic protein, or GFAP.
Dengler said the tests are extremely valuable because if the blood biomarkers are not elevated, there is a 99% chance that there is no bleeding in the brain.
That’s deemed a major improvement over the widely used Military Acute Concussion Evaluation, a 15-minute standardized cognitive assessment involving memory lists and concentration exercises.