Abstract

To report 2 cases of patients who had an ischemic stroke and an intracerebral hematoma after a superficial temporal artery-middle cerebral artery bypass with a thermal diffusion blood flow probe in situ and emphasize how a change in the way the data are presented could have led to an earlier diagnosis.Both patients had flow probes within 2 cm of the graft site and were thus close enough to be representative of local or regional rather than global perfusion. Data smoothening was applied to the raw data that were available and displayed on the monitor. Both the smoothed plots and the raw plots were analyzed.Good clinical correlation was observed between the flow probe data and the clinical condition of both patients. This was more apparent when viewing the smoothed plots.Although there was good clinical correlation, data displayed on the perfusion monitor can be incorrectly interpreted because the signal-to-noise ratio is small. We therefore suggest an alternative presentation of perfusion data for clinicians to recognize hypoperfusion and to take informed action before a stroke or hematoma is clinically manifest.

View details for DOI 10.1016/j.wneu.2015.08.032

View details for Web of Science ID 000366286300113

View details for PubMedID 26341435