Dr. Blaise BaxterStroke doctors at Erlanger Health System were all smiles as they stood before their colleagues in a conference room on Tuesday.
“As you can see, we’re in a very celebratory mood,” said Dr. Blaise Baxter, chief neurointerventional radiologist at the hospital. “This is a historic day, and it represents the culmination of work we’ve done since 1999.”
Historic is a word “we don’t use lightly,” said Dr. Tom Devlin, chairman of Erlanger’s neurosciences department.
The hospital is heralding its role in a breakthrough in acute stroke treatment, as a series of successful clinical trials will soon “usher in a new era for stroke treatment,” Devlin said.
The treatment, known as endoscopy, uses tiny devices threaded through a stroke victim’s blood vessels to fish out blood clots in the brain. At Erlanger, the method has been a standard part of treating the most severe strokes since the late 1990s.