Study: MRI Analysis Predicts Stroke Patient Outcome

Researchers say they have developed a technique that can predict — with 95 percent accuracy — which stroke victims will benefit from intravenous, clot-busting drugs and which will suffer dangerous and potentially lethal bleeding in the brain. Recently reported online in the journal Stroke, the Johns Hopkins research team said that these predictions were made possible by applying a new method they developed that uses standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to measures damage to the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from drug exposure. The method is a computer program that lets physicians see how much gadolinium, the contrast material injected into a patient’s vein during an MRI scan, has leaked into the brain tissue from surrounding blood vessels. By quantifying this damage in 75 stroke patients, researchers identified a threshold for determining how much leakage was dangerous. Then, the team applied this threshold to those 75 records to determine how well it would predict who had suffered a brain hemorrhage and who had not. The new test correctly predicted the outcome with 95 percent accuracy. To learn more about the study, click here.