For all Financial support When treating stroke victims in recent decades, some concerns have remained almost constant. In medicine we would like to say that “time is the brain”, which means that every moment when a stroke is not treated escalates the potential for long -term brain damage or deaths. In fact, every minute in which the brain goes without blood flow goes the average patient loses around 1.9 million neurons And experts say about a week of independent life.
Since the vast majority of strokes are ischemic, with a blood clot blocking the oxygen flow to the brain, it is critical that Clot is quickly critical. This applies whether the clot is small or large and independent of its density, but it has proven to be a difficult task.
Although this concerns, time and density are not necessarily connected, both matter are – one reason that researchers suggest that a newly developed technology from Stanford University Keep the potential to redesign the treatment of stroke patients.
The device, called a milli spinner, is a tiny, powerfully rotating hollow tube with fins and slots. In action, both laboratory and pig tests show the ability to be dramatically compact And reduce the size of blood clots and make it easier to remove them quickly and effectively – often on the first attempt.
“This has the potential to be a game changer,” says Greg Albers, director of Stanford University Stroke Center and long-time expert in this area. “The results are likely to be transferred to clinical studies.”
Aaron Kehoe
The mechanical thrombectomy is a minimally invasive procedure that removed the blood clot. Existing thrombectomy methods that contain strive for Cleaning over a catheter or try to grab and remove it by A Stent are not mainly designed in such a way that the size of blood clots is reduced. The Milli spinner seems to do this almost routinely-and very quickly, sometimes in a matter of seconds.
In A Paper Published on June 4th in the Scientific Journal NatureThe Milli spinner had some bold numbers. In flow model tests and pig experiments, the thrombectomy device introduced via a catheter showed the ability to reduce clot by up to 95%. “In most cases, we have more than doubled the effectiveness of current technology.” According to Dr. Jeremy Heit, PhD, head of neuroimaging and neuro intervention at Stanford and co-author of the study, says Dr. Jeremy Heit, Md, Md, Md.
Near a clot placed the milli spinner, both compression and shearing forces will exercise red blood cells from the sometimes dense fibrine that has bound it in a lump-a somewhat unexpected development when he was observed for the first time in the laboratory, says Rennee Zhao, the Stanford engineer, who has designed the milli spinner and the leading author of the lead author of the Lead author of the lead author of the Lead author of the Lead of the Labor of Stanford, who designed the milli spinner, and the guideline of the lead author of the lead author of the Lead author of the Stanford engineer, who was the lead author of the ladder’s living, was. Nature Study.
“For us it was magic, because even after we had seen the phenomena, it was not very easy to find out the labor mechanism directly” Assets.
A fibrinker remains closely bound by the milli spinner, but is now dramatically smaller than before and easily removable. (Imagine you put some cotton sweetness in your hand and then close your fist.) “What is crazy is, it works in seconds – this thing will literally turn into a tiny clot and simply suck it in the catheter in a matter of seconds. “It’s incredibly fast.”
According to researchers, there are many work, including full human exams. However, if the results are still close to what was achieved in the laboratory and in the pig work, the device could change the treatment path for an overly all -too, too serious medical problem.
Strokes are the Fifth cause of death in the United States with around 160,000 deaths per year among the Almost 800,000 cases diagnosed annually. Around Nine out of ten strokes Are ishemic or clot. Patients with ischemic strokes are often treated with clot medication such as TPA or thrombectomy (sometimes), but the mechanical techniques still occur on errors.
In some cases, a clot is simply too great to be extracted by a stent or an aspiration device, or can be held too firmly on a vascular wall. In other cases, the clot can cancel small parts during the re -admission. The blood flow can continue to the brain, which may make the size of a stroke larger or causes a new deficit, says Heit.
“Both aspiration and stent retriever have a high risk of creating fragmentation,” says Zhao. “The Milli spinner actually prevents it from happening,” at least in the laboratory.
Current thrombectoma devices successfully remove in less than 50% of cases, and in about 15% of the cases they fail as a whole, say experts say. It is important because people where the blockade is removed when the first attempt with thrombectomy is removed better clinical results as those who need several passes.
“The results are much better than if they try to open everything two or four,” says Maresh Jayaraman, chairman for diagnostic imaging at Brown University. “Of course we need to know that (the milli spinner) can be safe and effective in humans. If this is the case, it can have the potential to revolutionize dramatically how we think about removing blood clots from the brain.”
Zhao says she and her colleagues have not really tried to solve this problem, at least not at the beginning. Rather, the engineer had been Work on Millirobots—Tiny, origami-based spinning device that can swim that do not have to do with the bloodstream. Driven by an external magnetic field, the millirobots that are still under development can deliver medicine From targeted regions in the body, you carry out diagnostic tasks or even wear instruments or cameras one day.
The spinning millirobots “create a highly localized, very strong suck,” says Zhao. “We thought about it, okay, we can use this suction to suck a clot? It was just extremely simple – I mean a very simple way of thinking.”
In the brain artery’s laboratory flow model, the milli spinner was 100% effective in order to remove clots in more than 500 tests. In pigs, the device restored at least half of the blood flow to blocked blood vessels in 90.3% of the cases. And it was almost four times better to open the artery for the toughest clots.
“I expect (the device) to be a change in the sea in technology to treat patients with acute ischemic stroke,” says Heit. “If blood clots are removed with high success rates in humans in our experiments, what we expect, the milli spinner will save tens of thousands of life or more and reduce disability in treated patients.”
Clinical human studies are the next step. Observing the areas, says Arthur Adam, a neurosurgeon and stroke expert at the health sciences of the University of Tennessee, heard how the human brain tissue is influenced by the new thrombectomy method and how the cells and rubble behave as soon as they are released from the fibrine by the Milli spinner.
“Human trials are essential and sometimes show very different results than what we see in early results,” says Adam.
Nevertheless, the development appears promising. “It is a very exciting new device with great potential,” says Colin Derdeyn, chairman of radiology and medical imaging at the Medical School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. “If it works in humans and in these models, it improves recanalization rates – as often as we can open a blocked artery in the brain, in the heart or in the lungs. This leads to better results in patients with stroke, heart attack and pulmonary embolism.”
It can only be the front of the technology. Zhao and her colleagues believe that the unbralued, robot version of the milli spinner can swim directly into blood vessels to treat blood clots, braineurysms, kidney stones and other diseases. In the meantime, the team in California has founded a company that drove clinical studies on Milli Spinner.
“In view of the growing patient pool and this very promising technology, we may be able to save a lot of patient life,” says Zhao. “We want to see this technology in humans – and the earlier, the better.”
