The Center’s Parisa Farzam received a Poster of Excellence Award at the MGH Research Fellow Poster Celebration held last week. The award recognized her poster “Noninvasive optical monitoring of cerebral perfusion to predict the outcome of mechanical thrombectomy – Towards personalized acute stroke treatment,” which presented work done with Maria Angela Franceschini, also of the Martinos Center, and Drs. Nirav Patel, Henrikas Vaitkevicius and Ali Sultan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Neurology.
Mechanical thrombectomy is a promising new modality of interventional stroke treatment by removing thrombi from the large neurovasculature in acute ischemic strokes to restore blood flow. In the work described in the poster, the researchers used the optical technique diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) to noninvasively monitor cerebral perfusion changes during clot removal. This approach could aid in predicting outcome and thus could contribute to personalized therapy plans. Moreover, DCS monitoring enables the surgeon to observe blood flow changes in real time and alerts him or her of the open vessel immediately after the clot removal. In current practice, the surgeon needs to inject contrast agent and acquire angio images after each clot removal attempt to determine whether opening of the vessels was successful.
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