The Stroke Team at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, SC, including Aquilla Turk, DO, Associate Professor of Radiology, M. Imran Chaudry, MD, Assistant Professor of Radiology, and Raymond D. Turner IV, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Radiology, enrolled the first patient in the Stroke Treatment And Revascularization Therapy (START) trial. The START trial aims to correlate clinical outcome after acute stroke intervention to pragmatic image guided patient selection criteria.
“The START Trial is the beginning of a scientific process to understand which acute stroke patients will benefit most from interventional therapeutic procedures. The entire Stroke Team including neurointerventional physicians often put a tremendous amount of organizational and personal effort into treating this emergency disease 24 hours per day. Using non-invasive imaging to quickly understand which patients are likely to have a good recovery will allow us to treat this devastating condition much more efficiently and aggressively,” said Dr. Turk.
The START Trial is an open-label, prospective, single arm, multi-center outcome trial of severe (NIHSS ≥ 10) large vessel ischemic stroke in the anterior circulation with known infarct size on admission. Patients must be enrolled less than 8 hours from symptom onset. A central core lab headquartered at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA will read all imaging data.