ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Half of hospitals across the world aren’t equipped to do the advanced imaging that can determine if a patient is eligible for life-saving mechanical thrombectomy. Methinks AI has set out to make all hospitals, large and small, better able to triage stroke patients, by using AI to get more information out of basic non-contrast CT scans.
Stroke care is evolving rapidly, thanks in part to the advent of endovascular clot-removing device therapies. Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that in selected patients treated up to 24 hours after the onset of ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has significantly improved rates of disability-free survival as compared to conventional medical therapy. Until 2015, if patients didn’t make it to the hospital within four and a half hours of stroke onset to get the intravenous thrombolytic drug tPA, no further acute treatment was available (at most hospitals) as thrombectomy was not considered standard of care.
