People know about MRI, CT, SPECT and PET: all acronyms of machines that kick out imaging that makes it possible to examine what’s wrong inside the brain. And when patients do receive the bad news, they deserve no less than CereScan’s advanced brain imaging software for predictive diagnoses – arguably the best in the US. John Kelley, CEO of CereScan, leads his company in taking patient information regarding certain brain disorders and combining that with other factors in their life. With this data, CereScan can quickly come up with a good, predictive diagnosis for whatever their problem could be. Patients then have the ability to start correlating diagnostic data to life events, pharmaceutical and genetic predisposition for certain conditions. CereScan sheds a new light into how we might be able to treat brain diseases: conditions once considered taboo and incurable.

Advanced Brain Imaging Software With CereScan’s John Kelley

We’re incredibly fortunate to have John Kelley, CEO of CereScan. You’re going to be fascinated by the story. John, welcome to the show. 

Bob, thank you for having us on. It’s an honor to be on here and be able to talk to your audience. It’s a terrific opportunity for us.

For the folks that don’t know what CereScan is, could you give them a thumbnail sketch of your company and who you serve? 

In the United States, we’re arguably the best company in the country that takes patient information regarding certain brain disorders and combining that with other factors in their life to be able to come up with something that’s predictive or a good diagnosis for whatever their problem is. We are the best at doing that.

For the folks that are interested in the technology space, what are the tools that you bring to the table to arrive at the data that you collect?

We’re an imaging company. People know about MRI, CT, SPECT and PET. All of those acronyms are about machines. Those machines kick out information in the form of imaging, things people might call X-rays. When you have the imaging side of things to be able to look and see what’s wrong inside of the brain, you then have the ability to start correlating that to life events, to pharmaceutical things, to genetic predisposition for certain conditions. We start combining all that information and it’s been available for a number of years in each of those categories.

There’s a notion of what you guys do and there’s the machinery like we’ve all seen on TV, it looks like a big doughnut that they put you through on a table. The part that was not apparent to me was the quantity of data that’s produced. You had an analogy from the data produced versus some of the other data that’s collected around on the planet. Can you draw the parallel between the data that you collect on the PET or the SPECT?

Yes. The information we will get out of cameras start approaching millions of data points per brain. We’re able to combine that with data around pharmaceutical usage, around blood types, proteins that might be in the blood, genetic information. Testing data, we’re combining millions of pieces of information and on the fly or instantaneously being able to correlate all that to see if there’s commonality across all of those data elements. It’s truly a super computing capability that we possess today.

You were talking about the Hubble telescope as an analogy. The Hubble collects not images. We all see the fantastic pictures that it had come up with, but that’s a result of data collection, is it not?

That’s correct. Hubble is a phenomenal piece of technology that’s taking invisible infrared light, it’s taken ultraviolet light, it’s taken other light spectrum and having other sound wave information coming and being aggregated at Hubble. That information then is converted for the human so that the astronomer can look at that and see a picture where there was no visible information as we know it. It’s being recreated by the computer so that the human can see what those technologies can pick up from looking at other constellations or other planets or stars and solar systems that might exist in the universe.

CereScan: The information we will get out of cameras start approaching millions of data points per brain.

It takes the data and makes us a picture. As humans, we’re visually cued and we go, “Here’s the disparity from one point to the other.” For you guys, it’s not just that data that you have. You also have your patient data as well, correct? 

That’s correct. All data is important and having all available patient data. Patients generally allow us access to that in a very security compliant way and that it can’t be used in any public way where it could hurt the patient. We’re able to take and aggregate that information so that you’re looking for common problems across groups of patients. If a patient were exposed, let’s say it’s Flint, Michigan, to lead, it would be important to take a look at all patients who might have been exposed to lead in Flint to look for commonalities. You’re looking for heterogeneous and homogeneous data sets in order to make some intelligent guesses or intelligent information-based ideas about what problems might exist as a result of something like the lead poisoning event.

For you guys, we were talking about some of the challenges with data. You guys have enormous data. I don’t know how to characterize the quantity of data or data sets that you have from patients, but it’s in, I guess, the thousands?

It’s actually in the millions. It’s a lot of information. Information and data doesn’t mean much unless you can get intelligence out of it. Just having a lot of data is nice, but you want to have systems that can pull out some intelligence to get the information to the doctor or to the clinician or to the parent, where they’re able to take that data, convert into intelligence, and do something actionable. In the case of the brain, it could be a treatment, it could be a retrospective look at what might have happened to get the patient where they’re at today, and it might be something where you can take that information and help others.

We’ve now just been through science for a while and in statistics and data. Let’s say that somebody goes, “How would I know that CereScan is a place I should go and talk to my doctor and go see? What types of things do you guys observed when you bring a patient in here and what types of things can you conclude when you see them? 

 The brain is a sophisticated organism. It’s arguably the most powerful known computer in the universe, and with that comes complications. For people who are looking for solutions to problems, things that are disorders, how do you fix a problem if you don’t know what it is? Our main mission is to go out and help doctors figure out what are the likely issues that do exist. There could be more than one. You could have more than one thing wrong. If you know what those are, then you have a chance to go back and try things that are proven scientifically to be able to fix a problem.

It could be as simple as diet change or it could be a pharmaceutical regimen. You might be able to get enough information to try something that’s on the cutting-edge of repairing a problem. People who are suicidal are clearly looking for something that can sustain life. At the end of the day, we’re a quality of life company. Can we help medical professionals and family members set up a scenario where a patient suffering from brain disorders can have a quality of life that is back to what they used to have before something may have occurred or in fact, give quality of life before disease takes over.

An example of that would be Alzheimer’s. Can we help prolong a quality of life by doing the right types of therapies or preventative medicine that sustains a better environment for them as compared to their steady decline into oblivion? I have it in my family so I’m keenly interested in the Alzheimer’s aspects of what can we do and identify and what can be done as early as possible to keep the disease from making life miserable for everybody.

The things that are in the headlines are the returning soldiers that have some form of brain injury from a concussion or they hit an IED. We talked a little bit about typical things that older technology would see and the things that this newer technology might point out. Can you dig into that a little bit for maybe we have some soldiers listening?

Yeah. I was a prior service person. I was drafted as well and a lot of my peer. This was during the Vietnam War era. I’ve watched a lot of my peers go mainly the alcohol route with a lot of alcoholism. What happened to them? It didn’t happen to me, but what happened to them? There are three big buckets that are generally categorized in the military. You have the thing called traumatic brain injury or chronic traumatic brain injuries. It’s generally related to concussion events where the brain sustains damage and it doesn’t seem to repair fully. You have a thing called PTSD, which is generally attributed to psychiatric set of conditions that can result from stress of deployment, so on and so forth. Then we’re running into a new area that has alarmingly been more prevalent than what anyone thought, and that was around toxic poisonings.

For the military people who were involved with burn pits or may have been in the warrant officer helicopter area where a kerosene fumes come back into the aircraft itself, or for folks who are doing plastic explosives or handheld devices to kick out a propellants, we’re seeing a high correlation of things that are related to PTSD or TBI where, in fact, the brains of our military personnel are being basically poisoned over time or an environment where those chemicals get inside the brain and tend to a lodge in there permanently and create very psychiatric-like symptoms. It’s been an alarming thing for me to see. I would draw the analogy of Agent Orange from my era that took years to manifest itself in many cases in, unfortunately, cancer-like things. These chemicals in a hazardous environments such as our military people have gone through can, in fact, be very impactful. People need to be aware of the fact that it might not be PTSD and it might not be traumatic brain injury.

For the folks out there going like, “I have a friend or it’s me or a relative and we’ve been at war for twenty years,” the incidence of certain behavioral things stick out. If you’re the listener, a friend, or perhaps somebody that got those things, how do they find you? What’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

They go into our website which is www.CereScan.com. It’s a very informative website with short videos that do address things like traumatic brain injury, toxic poisonings, and get into suicides, ADHD and bipolar. It’s very informative. Primarily, medical doctors, very accredited doctors, will talk in common English. That would be the best thing to do. For the military personnel, the efforts that we’ve made over the last five years have been to how can we get what we do to the normal human being? We have been successful as of late of securing certain insurance reimbursement for civilian and military. Tricare and the western half of the United States through UHC would be an example of that for traumatic brain injury, and we’ve had success with Blue Cross Blue Shield and Texas United Healthcare in Colorado.

We’re having to work our way systemically, logically, methodically, factually through the insurance companies so that reimbursement becomes a reality for the patient. In the military, it could be their family too. Your son or daughter could have sustained an accident on a bike and it might be nice to know if those concussion symptoms sustain themselves and are they permanent, what might you be able to do with that with good information?.

The brain is arguably the most powerful known computer in the universe, and with that comes complications.

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Let’s say that there’s somebody out there that’s going, “This would merit further exploration,” but as diagnosis and all that happens, you guys also have seen the value of certain regimens to take an offset some of the symptoms? 

Again, what do you do? How do you fix a problem if you don’t know what it is? That’s number one. Number two, as we’ve seen now, nearly 4,200 patients have come through our sites around the country. Finding out commonalities of problems has had the wonderful impact of saying what could be done to prevent? We’ve had to go forward in order to go backwards. Backwards means how do I best put into place things that can prevent problems? Things like Alzheimer’s, early identification, clearly today, the medical industry would argue the right kind of diet, the right kinds of food, don’t smoke, fish oil, so and so forth. If you had a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s disease, we’re showing impairment early on for that, you might want to be able to go back and say, “I’m going to take preventative steps that could increase my quality of life.”

I’m using that disease as an example, but that would also pertain to things like after impact or birth trauma, things like toxic poisonings, identification of people who are suicidal and the commonalities among people who are suicidal, things you really shouldn’t do, treatments, pharmaceuticals, what have you, that could produce a bad cauldron that could put a person on the edge. Having that information and giving that to doctors for them to do something creative, medically-sound, proactive and done before a disaster takes place like a suicide to us is a very rewarding breakthrough in the medical world today.

I think about the challenges for adoption. Our medical regulatory authorities have their procedures going through. I usually ask this question, if it’s such a great technology, why doesn’t everybody know about it? What do you think the reason that people don’t know about this it would be?

We’re a small company, we’re not Johnson & Johnson. We have all the challenges of a small company of getting that message out. We don’t have the money to get it on television. Fortunately, shows like this help us spread the word. We don’t have the money to go do a broad brush of advertising or promotional thing; that’s impediment number one. Number two, it was cash pay. When I had the opportunity to take over as CEO, it was cash. You’re talking about a few thousand dollars to do all the things that I’ve described. Not everybody has pocket change of a few thousand dollars. The next step was let’s see if we can make this less cash intensive to the people in need. Our path to insurance has been one way to do that. There had been foundations and charitable organizations who have helped. We’re trying to address that one.

The third is how do I get to the site? Initially, we started in Denver. We’ve now expanded to Southern California, most of the central part of Texas, Dallas, Houston, and Corpus Christi. We’re in New Orleans, we’re in Naples, Florida. We are in Chicago and Alabama. We try to expand our capabilities through other very highly-rated medical institutions where they can take and put CereScan and embed it in their business there. We’re expanding the accessibility of what we have, trying to take costs for the normal human being out of the equation. I feel very strongly about that. I’m from a small town in Missouri. My family and peers wouldn’t typically have the money to go do what we do. I would like to see this yet so that it’s not the purview of the rich, but it’s available to everybody who has a need. When it comes to mental disorders, there are a lot of people who are in need that can’t afford it today.

We see that on the news regularly where there’ll be a higher incidence of one brain disorder versus another, whether it’s autism or Parkinson’s, perhaps in some locales and others. How do you see CereScan over the next four or five years interfacing with providing data perhaps that will start to attack those problems?

You pointed out something that’s exciting for us that really portends the potential for CereScan and its partners to bring solutions to people. To validate that, the Ohio State University and their bio-informatics group has teamed up with this. A group that supports the Department of Defense, particularly through the three-letter agencies is teamed up with a six-month effort to do data analytics. We are now working our way through other partners through both universities and other practices who want to team up to make a difference because we can’t do everything ourselves. The objective is to get this propagated into facilities around the country so that everyone has that opportunity to avail themselves of what we do. We’re getting the best in other ancillary or adjacent companies that can propel at Florida.

An example of that would be getting DNA information. It would also be proteomics, meaning what proteins are in your blood. A simple example would be if I have a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s, I’m showing from a testing perspective that I’ve got cognitive decline in an area, let’s say you’re having a hard time with mathematics and remembering numbers. We’re showing from the imaging side that you’ve got decline in functionality in that area and that you’ve got a protein that’s associated with Alzheimer’s. You now have five data points that would give a doctor a fairly strong opinion that you’re on a downwards slope in this very nasty dementia. Having that early, then what can you do about it? If we can get enough people who can identify it early, maybe we’ll find out that there are treatments or body of treatment that can help slow down the progression of that disease and enhance the quality of life that I talked about.

We were talking a little bit about the toxic poisoning from exposure. We talked about flint, we talked about propellants and so on. For the legal community that’s out there, how does CereScan interface with the legal community? I understand they use your services. 

If you think about the rich data that we’ve produced, and because it’s done so consistently in a very objective way in a super computing environment sometimes identified as artificial intelligence, the objectivity of that is appreciated in...