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(Stroke. 2006;37:297.)
© 2006 American Heart Association, Inc.

Advances in Stroke 2005

Advances in Imaging 2005

From the Western General Hospital (J.M.), Edinburgh, UK; and the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. (S.W.).

Correspondence to Joanna Wardlaw, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh, United Kingdom EH4 2XU. E-mail dcn.stroke.journal@ed.ac.uk

Key Words: CT • imaging • MRI

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Understanding of the role of imaging in stroke has quietly moved forward on several fronts in 2005, without any very major breakthroughs. We will highlight articles that illustrate aspects of the continuing debate about the utility of MR and computed tomography (CT) in selecting patients for therapy, assessing outcomes, determining stroke etiology and risk of new events.

We begin our sampling of 2005 highlights with an angiographic study that relates to the physiological premise of brain perfusion studies. We should not be surprised to be reminded that there is a close relationship between the neurological severity of the stroke as measured on the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and the site of cerebral arterial occlusion—a proximal internal carotid artery occlusion is likely to cause a more severe stroke than a distal middle cerebral artery (MCA) branch occlusion—but Fischer and colleagues have taken that one step further by actually placing predictive values for the presence and site of a cerebral arterial occlusion on the NIHSS score.¹ For example, among 226 patients undergoing intra-arterial angiography within 4 to 6 hours of acute ischemic stroke, an NIHSS of 10 was associated with an internal carotid artery occlusion in 97% and a vertebrobasliar artery occlusion in 96%; an NIHSS 12 was associated with an intracranial arterial occlusion in 91% of cases.

There has been uncertainty over the role of early signs of ischemia on noncontrast CT in patient assessment for thrombolysis. Systems for scoring the extent of early signs of ischemia, . . . [Full Text of this Article]