ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHINWORTH
Jamie Hughes tells the story of that day in March as a series of fortunate events.
She had just finished walking her dogs, Louie and Luna. She remembers bending down to pick up a tennis ball and feeling faint. Then, for a minute, everything went black. Hughes dismissed it as nothing.
She did feel tired, though, so she walked into her Delhi Township bedroom to lie down. That’s when her husband Brad asked if something was wrong. Hughes responded in what she thought was her normal voice. But Brad heard garbled words and became alarmed. He called for their son Jake, a student at Elder High School, who had taken a physiology test on stroke symptoms that day.
Jake walked his mom through the BE FAST test, which stands in part for balance, eyes, face, arms, and speech. Hughes couldn’t raise her left arm and her face had started to droop. Jake remembered what T stands for: Time to go to the emergency room.
Andrew Ringer, M.D., the Mayfield Brain & Spine neurosurgeon who operated on Hughes at Good Samaritan Hospital that day, says it’s crucial to be able to identify stroke symptoms. Every second counts, even once patients like Hughes arrive at the hospital.
Doctors have been able to effectively treat minor strokes with clot-dissolving drugs since the 1990s, Ringer explains. But in 2015, researchers determined a procedure known as a thrombectomy is more effective at treating larger, life-threatening clots. The procedure involves removing the clot from the blood vessels. This restores blood flow and can reverse the stroke, preventing permanent brain damage.
But thrombectomies require a specialized medical team and expensive equipment that many hospitals don’t have. Since 2015, Ringer and his colleagues at Mayfield have worked to establish specialized stroke centers across Greater Cincinnati. So far, they’ve developed centers at Good Samaritan, Bethesda North, Jewish, and St. Elizabeth hospitals.
Hughes was rushed into surgery quickly, which greatly improved her odds of recovery, Ringer says. She also benefited from another recent development in stroke treatment—an artificial intelligence tool, developed by a company called Viz.ai. The technology sends images of brain scans to a server where an algorithm looks for patterns that indicate large blockages. If it detects one, it sends an alarm to a network of neurosurgeons, including Ringer.
A surgeon then reviews the scans and consults with neurologists to determine if the patient needs surgery. Because the AI identifies all potential blockages, the human review is an important step, Ringer says. But patients like Hughes show how effective the combination of a well-educated public, rapid detection and notification using AI, and the availability of a stroke center can be when everything goes right. “All of those things were ready and available for her and cut down her treatment time dramatically,” Ringer says.
Hughes’s family saw the results when they visited her in intensive care shortly after the surgery. “They all cried,” Hughes says, “because I was back to normal.”
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