St. Bernards celebrates grand opening of neurointerventional suite

Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – St. Bernards celebrated the grand opening of eastern Arkansas’s first neurointerventional care suite on Monday, aiming to improve stroke care in the region.

Inside the suite is a specialized imaging system called a biplane, which has two arms with X-rays, allowing images of the brain to be captured from two different angles simultaneously. This will allow physicians to treat certain types of strokes more quickly, as well as more efficiently diagnose and treat patients.

“The reason why that’s very important is because whenever we are treating strokes or aneurysms, it’s a lot faster and a lot more efficient to take the images at the same time,” said cerebrovascular neurosurgeon Dr. Nicolas Khattar, who will head the program. “It’s a lot safer whenever we’re treating strokes or different brain pathology, to be able to take images from multiple angles at the same time, and see where we are, what we’re working with.”

To treat certain types of stroke, physicians guide a thin tube into the blood vessels and then remove the clot blocking blood flow to the brain, with the biplane allowing for real-time blood flow tracking and for physicians to work faster and more accurately.

In about eight seconds, the biplane can generate a CT-like, three-dimensional image of the brain. Additionally, the suite is an all-in-one treatment area, allowing for imaging and procedures to be completed in the same room.

In addition to stroke and aneurysms, the center also aids with the treatment of certain tumors, carotid disease, stent carotid arteries, and narrowed blood vessels in the brain, and more.

Officials with the hospital said the suite offers a new level of care in Northeast Arkansas. Previously, patients had to travel to, or be transferred to, hospitals in Memphis, Little Rock, St. Louis, and more to receive the level of care offered in the suite.

“While St. Bernards has an excellent regional access center that can coordinate transfers very efficiently, transfers still take time, because Little Rock is still two and a half hours away, Memphis is still an hour away, and you can’t shave that off quickly,” Khattar said. “It’s estimated that we lose about a million neurons per minute whenever a patient has a large stroke. That’s a lot of minutes to wait, and that translates usually to long-term disability.”

St. Bernards serves 23 counties in Northeast Arkansas and Southeast Missouri, and of that amount, 21 of those have a stroke mortality rate about the national average, said Michael Givens, St. Bernards Medical Center administrator.

“This lab is a win for our entire region,” Givens said. “It is a resource for our regional clinics and our partnering hospitals and emergency rooms, who now have a world-class destination nearby to send their most critical patients.”

At the conclusion of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new suite, volunteers with the St. Bernards Auxiliary announced it planned to donate $300,000 to its installation.

“On behalf of our entire leadership and all of our team here at St. Bernards Medical Center, we cannot thank you enough for this amazing and wonderful gift to ensure that we can provide stroke care across the entire region,” Givens said.