Advanced Neurosurgical Techniques at Riverside Healthcare

Stroke is a complex condition to mitigate. Timely intervention is crucial, to help lessen the neurological deficit that accompanies a stroke. Riverside Healthcare is a designated stroke center, and advanced neurosurgical techniques are now available.

Here, neurosurgeon Dr. Jehad Zakaria shares how Riverside is upleveling the neurological care offered in the community.

Endovascular Intervention

One key advancement at Riverside is the ability to perform minimally invasive endovascular procedures. This is an intervention that involves accessing the affected stroke area through small incisions and using catheters, guidewires, and imaging technologies like fluoroscopy (X-rays) to then remove the blood clot causing stroke symptoms.

Such a procedure can also be employed in a preventative manner. This is typically done when the risk of future complications is high but not yet emergent. Scenarios where endovascular surgery might be used electively include carotid artery stenosis, aneurysm, and arteriovenous malformations (AVMs).

“Aneurysms that rupture are not true emergencies. They're urgent, they're not ‘elective’ in that sense, but we can treat these aneurysms and secure a rupture point in an aneurysm through the endovascular route,” explains Dr. Zakaria. “We also consider an aneurysm that has not ruptured but came about when a patient had, say, an incidental finding. Sometimes people will have headaches, or they have an image for a tumor or something like that, or they just have a car crash and they're doing fine, but they end up imaging the brain. When it's an unruptured aneurysm, there are different criteria.”

Whether or not someone undergoes a procedure to address an unruptured aneurysm depends on a consensus between the neurosurgical team and the patient.

Expert Care Accessible Locally

Advanced neurosurgical techniques require highly specialized expertise. Dr. Zakaria actually went back to school for a fellowship at the University of Chicago in order to be able to provide these services to the local community. He understands the importance of having expert care in non-urban areas—particularly when it comes to the brain and mitigating neurological deficit.

“Time is really important. For good quality care, patients will generally go anywhere. It's really important. So, it's not just the geography, it's being able to provide excellent quality care here in town. If they have the option of getting their care here in their community hospital in an excellent fashion versus having to go elsewhere, I think they prefer getting it done here. But of course, the emphasis is on quality and that has been us being able to deliver the standard of care locally.”

For more information about neurosciences and our neuroscience team at Riverside click here.