This year at the annual International Stroke Conference (ISC), two oral presentations, one a plenary session, delivered ground-breaking science from postdoctoral fellows Rakeshkumar Patel, PhD, and Mariia Kumskova, MD. Both are members of Hematology, Oncology, and Blood and Marrow Transplantation Professor Anil Chauhan, PhD’s lab.
During the conference’s Main Event, Patel presented his most recent work, Uric Acid Supplementation Provides Cerebroprotection Across Multiple Animal Models: a report from the Stroke Preclinical Assessment Network (SPAN).
“The University of Iowa proposed uric acid (UA) as their candidate intervention for SPAN 1.0. These results reinforce both the cerebroprotective benefits of UA and the usefulness of including multiple animal models in translational stroke research and further supports that UA is a promising agent to be tested in patients with ischemic stroke undergoing reperfusion,” said Patel.
Kumskova presented A Novel Artificial Intelligence Method to Measure Functional Outcomes in Rodents: a report from the Stroke Preclinical Assessment Network (SPAN). In SPAN 1.0, each behavior video was analyzed by three randomly selected certified raters. This approach required a lot of human hours to quantify only the primary outcome.
“We aimed to develop an artificial intelligence-based method to reliably evaluate behavioral functional outcomes in various rodent models of ischemic stroke in a multicenter pre-clinical study,” said Kumskova. “It’s our big hope that the automated AI-based tool can revolutionize multicenter pre-clinical studies by scoring behavioral functional test data with rigor, reproducibility, and cost-efficiency.”
The American Heart Association (AHA) Midwest Newsletter covered these late-breaking reports: “A pair of University of Iowa researchers presented their findings after studying several potential cerebroprotective treatments on mice and rats. The SPAN study is using artificial intelligence to help analyze data as more research continues.”
Hear more from Patel and Kumskova about AI in science and what’s next for this research.
“SPAN brings clinical trial design and methodology to preclinical research to reduce or eliminate biases that can reduce the scientific rigor and improve replicability of the results generated in multiple laboratories,” said Chauhan. He and Enrique Leira MD, MS, are co-PIs of SPAN at the University of Iowa. “By using a randomized, placebo-controlled, blinded, multi-laboratory multi-stage, multi-arm approach we are able to select those stroke cerebroprotectants that have a higher likelihood of success in human clinical trials.”