An AI Model for the Brain Is Coming to the ICU

Cleveland Clinic is a partnership with the Piramidal startup based in San Francisco to develop a large -scale AI model that will be used to monitor patients’ brain health in intensive care units.

Instead of being formed on text, the system is based on electroencephalogram data (EEG), which is collected via electrodes placed on the scalp, then read by a computer in a series of corrugated lines. The EEG records electrical activity of the brain and changes in this activity may indicate a problem. In a context of intensive care, doctors scan EEG data in search of evidence of crises, altered consciousness or a decrease in brain function.

Currently, doctors are counting on continuous EEG monitoring to detect abnormal brain activity in a patient in intensive care, but they cannot monitor each individual patient in real time. Instead, EEG reports are generally generated every 12 or 24 hours, then analyzed to determine whether a patient experiences a neurological problem. He can take two to four hours to manually examine a day of data on brain waves.

“This type of thing takes time. He is subjective, and he is dependent on experience and expertise, “explains Imad Najm, neurologist and director of the epilepsy center of the Cleveland Clinic Neurological Institute.

The system that the Cleveland Clinic and Piramidal develops are designed to interpret continuous flows of EEG data and signaling anomalies in a few seconds so that doctors can intervene earlier.

“Our model plays this role of constantly monitoring patients in the USI and making doctors know what is happening with the patient and how their brain health evolves in real time,” explains Kris Pahuja, director of Piramidal products.

Pahuja and CEO Dimitris Fotis Sakellariou founded Piramidal in 2023, in order to build a brain foundation model – an AI system that can read and interpret the neural signals largely through different people. Before that, Sakellariou spent 15 years as a neuroengineer and scientist of AI doing EEG research. Pahuja worked on product strategy at Google and Spotify. Their startup, which is supported by Y combinator, raised $ 6 million in seed financing last year.

The company has built its brain model by using EEG data sets accessible to the public, as well as EEG data owners of the Cleveland Clinic and other partnerships. Sakellariou claims that the model includes nearly a million hours of EEG surveillance data of “tens of thousands” of patients, both neurologically healthy and unhealthy. The brain activity models are extremely variable from one person to another, so the construction of a brain foundation model requires huge amounts of data to capture common models and characteristics.

“The beauty of a foundation model is in the same way as the Chatppt can generalize the text, it can adapt to your tone, it can adapt to your way of writing – our model is able to adapt to the brain of different people,” explains Sakellariou.

Cleveland Clinic and Piramidal Team is currently using retrospective data for patients to refine the model. Over the next six to eight months, they plan to test the model in an environment that is closely controlled with data on living patients and a limited number of beds and doctors. From there, they aim to slowly deploy the software to all of the USI. Finally, the software will allow the hospital system to monitor hundreds of patients at a time, explains Najm.