How is innovation in stroke care guided by contemporary clinical trials? This was the question NeuroNews put to Atul Gupta, the Chief Medical Officer of Diagnosis & Treatment at Philips, who discussed what he sees as the recent trials to have had the biggest impact on the treatment of stroke.
“It is really important to us to keep our fingers on the pulse of clinical trends, and that includes clinical trials,” Gupta tells NeuroNews. “That is because it takes years to develop new platforms, like our next-generation Azurion biplane, and we need to see where the puck is headed as we develop these platforms.”
Gupta identifies the SEGA trial, comparing general anaesthesia and conscious sedation among stroke patients undergoing endovascular therapy (EVT), and the ZODIAC trial, which investigated the potential impact of head positioning in optimising blood flow to the brain in patients waiting to undergo thrombectomy, as two of the most impactful pieces of research in this space of recent times. He puts these trials into context from a research and development perspective.
“If you look at all of these clinical trials together, if we can triage the patients up-front, if we can localise the clot, if we can characterise the clot, and then if we can integrate that information into the Azurion cath lab—helping not just diagnosis but also navigating the treatment in the cath lab—that is what is going to make a difference.”
Gupta also discusses Philips’ recent launch of the Azurion biplane image-guided therapy system, which has been optimised for use in neurovascular procedures, and considers how trends such as augmented reality (AR) and robotics will have an increasing impact on the provision of care for patients with stroke.
