Reshaping Research With Our New Neurological Assessment Center (Podcast)

When Cleveland Clinic’s new Neurological Institute building opens in early 2027, arriving outpatients will walk through the building’s unique neurological assessment center for evaluation of their gait via markerless motion capture. They will then complete an objective quantitative assessment of manual dexterity and assessment, followed by a quick series of cognitive assessments.

All this data capture will be integrated into the standard clinical workflow, with the information immediately populated into the patient’s electronic medical record to inform care at their visit with their provider a few minutes later. This routine collection of objective neuroperformance measures — repeated at subsequent visits for longitudinal monitoring — has clear implications for clinical care, as detailed in a recent episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Neuro Pathways podcast with neurologist Robert Bermel, MD.

Yet the data collected will significantly impact neurological research as well, as discussed in a new companion episode of the Neuro Pathways podcast featuring Jay Alberts, PhD, Vice Chair of Innovation in Cleveland Clinic’s Neurological Institute.

“A really important aspect of the neurological assessment center is that it represents a standardized approach to collection of data on neurological function,” says Dr. Alberts. “From a research perspective, for conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, we frequently use very subjective measures for clinical trials. There could be a host of interventions out there that might actually show benefit, but we’ve had such a noisy measurement environment from an outcome perspective that the signal gets swamped in the noise. That’s where this standardized, data capture presents an opportunity to really improve our understanding of various interventions and to do better and more objective measurements for clinical trials.”

In the new podcast episode Dr. Alberts addresses the following issues:

• Essentials of Cleveland Clinic’s neurological assessment center
• Markerless motion capture and other technologies behind the neurological assessment center
• How the center and its data capture will be integrated into practice and research
• How the volume of data captured promises to enable predictive analytics and personalized medicine
• Initial research uses, such as falls prevention and identification of early disease markers
• Future directions, including potential use for expert assessment beyond specialized centers

Click the podcast player above to listen to the 29-minute episode now or read on for a couple of short edited excerpts of its transcript. Check out more Neuro Pathways episodes at clevelandclinic.org/neuropodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

This activity has been approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ and ANCC contact hours. After listening to the podcast, you can claim your credit here.

Excerpts from the podcast

Podcast host Glen Stevens, DO, PhD: I understand that a lot of the technology in the neurological assessment center was developed in-house at Cleveland Clinic. Tell us about that process and why you and others decided to do a lot of this in-house. Was it a matter of there not being anything out there to meet the needs to be addressed?

Jay Alberts, PhD: There are different aspects and different technologies that are out there. Certainly markerless motion capture is out there, and hand function assessments are out there. The problem was that it’s like putting a square peg in a round hole. The technologies weren’t designed for clinical integration. They were designed for use in research environments, where it takes 30 or 40 minutes to get an individual through the assessment paradigm and then 30 minutes or more to analyze the data. That just isn’t going to work in clinical practice.

So we were committed to the idea that this has to be integrated into clinical practice. And that’s not just integration into the workflow. A big aspect is integrating the data into the electronic health record, because you have to be able to discuss these data with the patient to make sense of it and make use of it. To me, that’s an exciting part of it, that we are using data now to bring the patient and the provider together on the same page. And there just really were no other systems out there we could use that had that level of integration.

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Dr. Stevens: Looking forward, what excites you most about the neurological assessment center from a research perspective?

Dr. Alberts: Beyond all the things we’ve talked about, I’m excited about working with junior faculty here who are really interested in asking and answering really good research questions, because now we're going to have the data to start addressing those questions. Within a month of when we start using the assessment center, we’re going to have more data than any other center or any other system or nonprofit in the world. So I'm excited about working with the next generation of clinician-scientists to ask and answer really good, provocative questions.