CoMind today announced the publication of its first two peer-reviewed papers in Neurophotonics, a leading journal in the biomedical optics research field. These companion papers represent the culmination of several years of work by the CoMind team and together lay out both the scientific rationale for the company's chosen approach and the experimental evidence that its research prototype, CoMind R1, delivers on the performance required for clinical-grade non-invasive monitoring of cerebral blood flow (CBF).

Continuous, bedside monitoring of cerebral blood flow remains one of the most significant unmet needs in critical care. Despite decades of research, no non-invasive technology for the continuous monitoring of CBF has yet achieved routine clinical use. CoMind's technology addresses this challenge by employing a time-of-flight (ToF) resolved optical sensing method that provides depth-resolved sensitivity to blood flow dynamics. 

Paper 1: Setting the Performance Target

The first paper led by Dr. Dominic Hill: "Monte Carlo simulations of time-resolved blood flow index: times-of-flight beyond ~1 ns are necessary for brain-dominated measurements," provides a rigorous quantitative assessment of in what circumstances speckle-based optical measurements of CBF become genuinely brain-dominated rather than dominated by superficial signals.

Using Monte Carlo simulations at 1064 nm, validated against both phantom and in-vivo data, the CoMind team systematically evaluated the contribution of different tissue layers as a function of source-detector separation, time-of-flight gate, and autocorrelation time-lag. The findings are clear and consequential: for a typical adult, a ToF of approximately 1 ns or greater is required to ensure the measured signal is dominated by cerebral rather than extracerebral tissue. To meet this threshold for the 85th percentile of adult brain depths, the required ToF gate rises to 1.2 ns.

Paper 2: A Device That Meets the Target

The second paper, led by Veronika Parfentyeva: "CoMind R1: A time-resolved interferometric optical neuromonitoring system for pulsatile cerebral blood flow measurement at late times-of-flight," describes the design, construction, and validation of CoMind's research prototype (CoMind R1), and demonstrates that it achieves the performance targets identified in the first paper

CoMind R1 integrates a high-power, linearly-swept 1064 nm laser with multimode fibre collection, parallelised detection, and real-time signal processing. The system achieves an instrument response function width of just 120 picoseconds and exhibits no significant drift over 24 hours of continuous operation.

In a study of 25 healthy adults, CoMind R1 consistently produced high-quality pulsatile cerebral blood flow waveforms at times-of-flight averaging 1.2 ns — exceeding the prior art and meeting the threshold identified in the companion simulation paper. In a separate experiment, visual stimulation produced significant, ToF-dependent haemodynamic responses in the visual cortex, directly demonstrating both brain sensitivity and tissue selectivity: CoMind R1 can not only measure CBF but distinguish it from superficial tissue blood flow.

A Foundation for Clinical Translation

Together, these two peer-reviewed papers form an integrated foundation for CoMind's work. The simulation paper establishes the level of device performance needed for clinical translation; while the device paper demonstrates that CoMind R1 achieves that performance in a scalable, robust architecture. CoMind’s ongoing focus is to build on this exceptional foundation and achieve an optimised, multi-parameter neuromonitoring technology - CoMind One - ready for launch in 2027. 

To quote Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Rob Cooper: “These papers are a huge milestone for CoMind and represent the culmination of years of technical development across multiple domains. The first paper outlines the fundamental arguments in favour of the optical sensing approach we have chosen to pursue, and makes clear the level of performance needed for clinical translation. The second paper shows that we are already achieving that target."