The hyperdense vessel sign in cerebral computed tomography: pearls and pitfalls

Occurrence of malignant cerebral infarction following intracranial hematoma evacuation in traumatic brain injury: A case report

Background

Traumatic brain injury-related cerebral infarctions are well-documented in the literature. We want to report a case of malignant cerebral infarction that occurred at the contralateral location of evacuated epidural hematoma 3 days after surgery. The early-onset cerebral infarction's clinical presentation was already evident during the initial clinical examination, and it resembled "Kernohan's Notch Syndrome."

Case Description

A 57-year-old male Indonesian was taken to our Academic General Hospital's emergency room following a motorcycle accident. His primary complaints were reduced consciousness and left-sided hemiparesis. A head computed tomography (CT) scan revealed an intracerebral hematoma beneath an epidural hematoma (EDH) at the left temporal area. The EDH was surgically removed promptly. The patient's Glasgow coma scale improved, and they were able to follow commands afterwards. The patient had a decreased consciousness 3 days after the surgery. A malignant infarction of the right middle cerebral artery region was identified from the head CT scan evaluation. He immediately had an emergency decompressive craniectomy and had an improvement of consciousness following the surgery.

Conclusion

It is imperative to reassess the initial clinical signs of Kernohan's notch phenomenon to determine whether the offending mass was able to generate this clinical phenomenon. Initial cerebral infarction, which occurs concomitantly with traumatic intracranial hematoma, is a possible cause of clinical deterioration following the surgery.

Fully Automated Thrombus Segmentation on CT Images of Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke

Thrombus imaging characteristics are associated with treatment success and functional outcomes in stroke patients. However, assessing these characteristics based on manual annotations is labor intensive and subject to observer bias. Therefore, we aimed to create an automated pipeline for consistent and fast full thrombus segmentation. We used multi-center, multi-scanner datasets of anterior circulation stroke patients with baseline NCCT and CTA for training (n = 228) and testing (n = 100). We first found the occlusion location using StrokeViewer LVO and created a bounding box around it. Subsequently, we trained dual modality U-Net based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to segment the thrombus inside this bounding box. We experimented with: (1) U-Net with two input channels for NCCT and CTA, and U-Nets with two encoders where (2) concatenate, (3) add, and (4) weighted-sum operators were used for feature fusion. Furthermore, we proposed a dynamic bounding box algorithm to adjust the bounding box. The dynamic bounding box algorithm reduces the missed cases but does not improve Dice. The two-encoder U-Net with a weighted-sum feature fusion shows the best performance (surface Dice 0.78, Dice 0.62, and 4% missed cases). Final segmentation results have high spatial accuracies and can therefore be used to determine thrombus characteristics and potentially benefit radiologists in clinical practice.

Association of a High Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio with Hyperdense Artery Sign and Unfavorable Short-Term Outcomes in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke

Purpose

Immune–inflammatory processes are involved in all the stages of stroke. This study investigated the association of the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) with the hyperdense artery sign (HAS) observed on brain computed tomography (CT) and with clinical features in patients with acute ischemic stroke.

Methods

We retrospectively enrolled 2903 inpatients with acute ischemic stroke from May 2010 to May 2019. Data collected included imaging studies, risk factors, laboratory parameters, and clinical features during hospitalization.

Results

The HAS was identified in 6% of the 2903 patients and 66% of the 236 patients with acute middle cerebral artery occlusion. Patients with the HAS had a higher NLR. HAS prevalence was higher in men and patients with cardioembolism. The NLR exhibited positive linear correlations with age, glucose and creatinine levels, length of hospital stay, initial National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) scores, and mRS scores at discharge. The NLR was significantly higher in patients with large-artery atherosclerosis and cardioembolism and was the highest in patients with other determined etiology. Multivariate analysis revealed that an initial NIHSS score of ≥10 and an NLR of >3.5 were significant positive factors, whereas diabetes mellitus and age > 72 years were significant negative factors for the HAS, with a predictive performance of 0.893. An initial NIHSS score of ≥5, positive HAS, age > 75 years, diabetes mellitus, an NLR of >3.5, female sex, a white blood cell count of >8 × 10³/mL, and elevated troponin I were significant predictors of unfavorable outcomes, with a predictive performance of 0.886.

Conclusion

An NLR of >3.5 enabled an efficient prediction of CT HAS. In addition to conventional risk factors and laboratory parameters, both an NLR of >3.5 and CT HAS enabled improved prediction of unfavorable stroke outcomes.