How to assess acute cerebral ischemia.

There are different approaches to the assessment of acute stroke. Its causes, its severity, and/or its final prognosis may be investigated. The traditional approach is anatomoclinical. It is basically limited to finding out if the lesion is a hemorrhage or an ischemia, and its location. This approach is derived from and supported by the fact that acute stroke is still without a valid therapy. In our opinion, not stroke but individual patients presenting with stroke should be treated. The pathophysiology of the individual stroke should be investigated by means of new techniques: magnetic resonance, emission tomography, and transcranial Doppler. These new techniques will be important in the future, making it possible to create effective therapeutic strategies, designed for treating a particular subgroup of patients, as in the case of fibrinolytic agents. The main aspects of these new techniques for evaluating acute ischemic stroke have been reviewed in this article.