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VIEWERS of ABC TV’s popular New Inventors program have voted a ground-breaking diagnostic technique for detecting mental and neurological illness as this year’s winner.
The EVestG, is a new diagnostic technique that measures the patterns of electrical activity in the brain’s vestibular (balance) system, fast-tracking the detection of illness.
It was voted the winner by both the program’s expert panel and the People’s Choice.
The developer, Brian Lithgow, is a senior lecturer in electrical and computer systems engineering at Monash University, with research interests in neurological, neurodegenerative and vestibular diagnostics. He saw “the diagnostic potential of measuring and comparing different patterns of electrovestibular activity because the brain’s vestibular system is closelyconnected to the regions of the brain that relate to emotions and behaviour”.
By measuring the patterns of electrical activity in the brain’s vestibular system against distinct response patterns found in depression, schizophrenia and other central nervous system disorders, he was able to develop electrovestibulography – or EVestG for short.
“[It’s] sort of like an ECG for the mind,” he said.
An artist’s impression of the final format of the technology when it goes to market in two to three years.
Working with Professor Jayashri Kulkarni (PhD) and other researchers from Monash University’s Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, they further tested volunteers to find distinct biomarkers to distinguish the different conditions from each other, and from regular electrovestibular activity. The product measures electrical activity in the brain before and after stimulation of the vestibular system through use of sensors placed within each ear canal, while the patient sits in a tilt chair.
Measurement takes 30 minutes, and has been found to be painless, and comfortable for patients. Tests to date have found it to be 90% accurate.
Diseases for which it has been tested also include Parkinson’s disease, Meniere’s disease, positional vertigo and Asperger’s, said Dr Roger Edwards, CEO of Neural Diagnostics, the company developing the product.
He said it had secured federal funding to continue the research, which had reached proof-of-concept trials. “If current results continue and statistical robustness holds up we are confident we have something quite transformational for medical practice.”
