How does clot retrieval work?

Stroke therapy is broken into medical therapy and what we call endovascular stroke rescue. And endovascular has been shown to be the standard of care for patients who don't necessarily respond to medical therapy for stroke in the very early stages. Or even sometimes those who can't receive that medical therapy for various reasons. Stent retrieval has now been proven to be the main method in which to open arteries using noninvasive or minimally invasive surgical techniques to fight stroke. What that means is that you bring wires and catheters through the patient’s arteries. Moving these wires and catheters into the particular artery inside of the brain that has been blocked by a clot. With those same wires and catheters you slip through the clot itself, because it is fairly soft material even though it's blocking the artery from getting blood to the brain. You can pass through this clot and then you deploy or push out of these little micro catheter stents that are metal mesh tubes that open up in the artery. They not only return blood supply as soon as you're doing that to the brain that needs it so desperately, but at the same time they work themselves into that clot and they grab it if you will, and so that clot retrieval is retrieving that same stent. A lot of people associate stents with cardiac stents where the physician would go in place a stent and leave it in there. In stroke we actually have stents that are designed to remain attached to the wire that we use to deploy or push the stent out of the catheter. We can then pull that stent out through the artery and with it comes the clot. Which allows blood supply to get to the brain and hopefully reverse the stroke.