AI Saves the Day

[Transcript]
My name is Julie Knichel. I've been a nurse for 25 years, 18 and a half in a trauma facility, and I've been here at Marcus Neuroscience Institute, Boca Regional Neuro ICU for five and a half years. I do a lot of gardening, a lot of DIY, lifting heavy things and remodeling my house. I stayed quite busy and I try to eat healthy. On February 2nd, I woke up at 3 AM and I did have the worst headache of my life. I called 911 because I all of a sudden became very anxious. I knew I had to get to the hospital. When I came to the ER, they scanned me and they saw a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is usually from a ruptured aneurysm.

Julie had a type of stroke known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and that's just medical terminology for an aneurysm that's ruptured in the brain, and blood escapes the arteries, and then travels around the brain, and can cause damage to the brain. With a brain aneurysm rupture, the first signs that a patient will notice is usually a sudden onset worst headache of life. It's also called a thunderclap headache. So it's a headache that comes on out of nowhere. Patients often know the time that it happens. If there's a clock nearby, they say, "It happened at 3:14 PM."

I was rushed to the interventional radiology department. My colleagues actually met me there. My colleagues actually met me in the emergency room. So then Dr. Snelling was already here doing another emergent case and getting ready to leave, but then he saw it was me and he stayed and took care. He coiled my brain aneurysm for me.

We have a artificial intelligence technology that scans all of our brain imaging here at the hospital, and it diagnosed her as having bleeding on the brain. And it actually did that before our emergency room doctors and our radiologists were able to read the imaging. So instantaneously, our stroke team received notification that there was a patient in the emergency room with a brain bleed. They recognized the name, they knew it was a colleague of theirs. So they immediately ran down and evaluated her. She received appropriate imaging that showed that she did have a brain aneurysm that ruptured, and was then taken for emergency treatment to secure the aneurysm to make sure it didn't bleed again.

As a patient, it's really different being on the patient side, and now I feel like I can relate more with patients, but I've actually learned so much more about the entire process of how subarachnoids work after an aneurysm rupture. So it actually benefited me in that way.

For patients with ischemic stroke, certainly, it's a life-threatening emergency, and as soon as someone is recognized to have signs or symptoms of a stroke, they should call EMS, be evaluated, be brought to a comprehensive stroke center, like the Marcus Neuroscience Institute, where they can receive appropriate diagnosis and timely treatment. For other types of stroke, like a brain aneurysm rupture, certainly getting treated as quickly as possible is also the key to having the best recovery possible, meaning having the aneurysm secured, and prevented from rebleeding, taking care of any other issues, such as excess fluid buildup or excess pressure in the brain. All of those things need to be done expeditiously. So getting appropriate diagnosis and treatment at a comprehensive stroke center is critical to having a good outcome.

So my colleagues all came together and took such very good care of me the whole time I was in the hospital and after. It just really meant so much. Like I knew they cared about me, but not like I know now.