It's My Job
Dr. M. Ziad Darkhabani, right, works with Nancy Schulte, an interventional radiology technician to position an X-ray imaging arm to help guide him in threading a catheter into a patients brain to remove a blood clot. Scott Thuen / Special to The Forum
FARGO It was not long ago that treatment for a stroke focused on rehabilitation. Because of a lack of blood flow to the brain, most patients who survived suffered brain damage and other disabilities. They often faced months of rehabilitation or life in a care facility.
Today, if a stroke is diagnosed early and treatment applied, the survival rate and outcome can be better.
Dr. Ziad Darkhabani is a stroke and interventional neurologist at Essentia Health. He specializes in using catheters to remove blood clots and repair aneurysms in the brain.
Q. What do you do?
Interventional neurology means we treat the vessels of the head and neck using a catheter technique. A catheter is a plastic hose or tube made specially to go inside the vessel. Most of the time we go through the femoral artery, which is a vessel in the leg.
There are two aspects of the job.
The first is diagnostics where we go through the vessels and try to understand whats going on with them. We look to see if there is any narrowing of the vessels or any malformations.
The second is the intervention part, which is basically how we fix some of the vessel problems.
Here is the original post:
It's My Job: Stroke care moves forward