St. Mary’s Healthcare Offering New Blood Clot Removal for Stroke Victims

St. Mary’s Healthcare has announced a new emergency stroke treatment now available at their main campus in Athens.

It is the ability to physically remove the large-vessel blood clots that cause the most damaging strokes, according to St. Mary’s Healthcare spokesman Mark Ralston.

“The process is called mechanical thrombectomy. It’s a procedure where we use state-of-the-art imaging to physically go through blood vessels and remove the blood clots without having to do major open surgery,” said Ralston.

Up to now, the procedure has only been available at a handful of hospitals, mainly in Atlanta and Augusta, according to St. Mary’s Healthcare Spokesman Mark Ralston.

Ralston said the procedure is much less invasive than previous procedures.

“Strokes are commonly caused by a thrombus, or blood clot,” said St. Mary’s stroke coordinator Joanne Lockamy. “When a clot blocks a blood vessel, up to 2 million brain cells can die each minute, affecting everything from speech to walking. Clot removal gives us a fantastic new tool to help prevent death and long-term disability from strokes.”

St. Mary’s first mechanical thrombectomy was performed March 13 by Dr. Neil Woodall, a neurosurgeon who came to Athens in 2017 from Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, one of the leading neurosurgical training programs in the nation.

Using the system’s advanced imaging capabilities, Dr. Woodall and other specialists can obtain images in two planes simultaneously: front-to-back and side-to-side.

Powerful software combines these images in real time into highly detailed, three-dimensional views of internal structures, making it possible to visualize the large vessel blood clots that cause strokes and extract them.

Ralston says St. Mary’s is proud to offer the new stroke intervention technology.

“We’re very proud here at St. Mary’s Healthcare System that the latest advance in emergency stroke treatment is now available at St. Mary’s in Athens,” said Ralston.

In addition to removing the blood clots that cause major strokes, the system can be used to repair life-threatening aneurysms – areas in blood vessel walls that become weak and can rupture.