Stroke – Diagnosis Confirmation

Transcript

The diagnosis of the stroke is confirmed typically on brain imaging. And so the two brain imaging modalities that we’ll use to confirm a stroke, preferably it’s MRI. MRI is generally speaking, the gold standard way to confirm it and there’s something called diffusion weighted imaging where we see sort of a bright white dot where the stroke is at. It is black and white. It’s very clear and that’s what we see. There are some people who can’t get MRIs because they have a metal in their body. MRI is a big magnet, or if they have a pacemaker. In those cases we use CT. CT is less sensitive, but frequently we do eventually see the stroke on the CT and what we see on CT is an area of low density where the stroke is at. There’s a little bit of swelling and more water in that part of the brain is it swells up when it’s injured and we can see that looks at less dense than the rest of the brain. With our current state of the art imaging techniques, specifically MRI, we can confirm the diagnosis of a stroke in someone who’s had one in well over 90% of cases.