Strokes represent one of the leading causes of death and disability in the UK, impacting around 100,000 patients each year.
However, with one in seven strokes seen as preventable, a new project aims to enhance the ability to predict whether a person is at an increased risk of stroke.
Funded by a £300,000 grant from the Medical Research Council, the ABSTRACT project is being led by experts at the University of Plymouth, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust and the University of Exeter. They will also be working with two commercial providers of medical investigations, Express Diagnostics and Ultracardiac.
It will assess past brain scans and other medical test results of stroke survivors, and aim to establish if there are patterns which could have identified them as being at higher risk of stroke.
The researchers will then look to develop a series of artificial intelligence models that can predict whether someone is at greater risk of experiencing a stroke at any point over the next decade.
With the first five years of care post stroke costing the NHS around £3.6billion, and 13.7% of strokes regarded as being preventable, the project team hopes its work will not only improve lives but also prove cost effective at a time when the health system is under greater financial pressure than ever.
Dr Stephen Mullin, Associate Professor in Neurology in the University of Plymouth's Peninsula Medical School and Consultant Neurologist at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, is the project's principal investigator.
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