Advanced NeuroImaging for Acute Stroke Treatment

Wintermark, Max

Abstract

The conference we propose is entitled """"""""Advanced Neuroimaging for Acute Stroke Treatment"""""""" and will be held on Friday and Saturday, September 7 and 8, 2007 in Washington DC. This conference is relevant to the mission of the NINDS and also NIBIB. It was developed in response to the recommendations of the NIH Stroke Progress Review Group on Neuroimaging, chaired by Drs. Albers, Kidwell and Warach. This conference is designed to plan the critical steps required to validate advanced stroke imaging techniques for acute stroke patients, in order to promote their widespread use in the community. This would ultimately result in improved care and outcomes for a greater number of acute stroke patients. The target audience of this conference is an interdisciplinary group of experts in the field of acute stroke imaging and management. This conference will define the research priorities in the field of acute stroke imaging for the next five years. These directions will concentrate around three areas: 1) standardization of perfusion and penumbra imaging methodology, 2) trial design and patient selection for acute reperfusion therapy, and 3) development of multi-center collaborations and repositories for evaluating whether advanced stroke imaging does improve acute stroke patients' outcomes. The conference will span two days. The first day will consist of a series of overview presentations that will address the technical aspects of perfusion imaging and models of penumbra, then focus on their clinical applications, including selection of acute stroke patients for reperfusion therapy. The second day will consist of three concurrent workshops, each offered twice. These workshops will address the three areas listed above. For each of the three areas addressed, two sets of recommendations will be clearly stated: 1) what the researchers should do to help address the issues raised during the discussions regarding that topic, 2) what the NIH could do in terms of requests for applications (RFAs). These recommendations will constitute the core of the proceedings from the meeting, and will be published concurrently in Stroke and the American Journal of Neuroradiology. The organizing committee devoted significant effort to ensure desirable diversity among the invited speakers. Invited speakers represent a mix of established and junior scientists, coming from various geographic regions in North America, as well as Europe and Asia. Invited junior scientists, for whom funding is requested, were selected based on merit. ? ? ?