Stroke Care and Emergency

Call for Papers

Stroke is the second most common cause of death and the leading cause of early invalidity worldwide. While stroke remains one of the world’s most prevalent and devastating diseases, rapid diagnosis and treatment options for the majority of stroke victims are very limited. Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is the only drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for acute stroke treatment. However, only 3% of all stroke victims receive tPA. Neurointerventional techniques designed to mechanically retrieve vessel-occluding blood clots show great promise but are limited to highly specialized medical centers. The odds of good outcomes are significantly higher in industrialized countries where state-of-the-art care can be quickly accessed. However, 85% of all strokes occur in low- to middle-income countries where 85% of the world’s population resides. In an effort to limit the time-dependant loss of brain tissue, any delay in diagnosis and treatment should be avoided and ideally started once the emergency call has been dispatched. In stroke due to embolic brain vessel occlusion, nearly 2 million neurons die every minute. We would like to invite investigators to contribute original articles that will stimulate the efforts to investigate whether stroke can be detected in the prehospital environment and the development of potential noninvasive strategies to use ultrasound for thrombolysis in absence of tPA.

We are particularly interested in articles describing concepts of how stroke could be reliably diagnosed at the site of the emergency or during patient transport to the hospital, innovative concepts of how to improve stroke care in the translation between first responders and hospital admission, and new concepts of how stroke treatment could be initiated already “in the field.” Besides, prehospital stroke care main focus will be on innovative stroke treatment options in the absence of lytic drugs or neurointervention. The use of ultrasound in this regard (sonothrombolysis) is of special interest. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Diagnostic use of ultrasound in the prehospital environment
• Stroke epidemiology in industrialized / nonindustrialized countries
• Wireless medicine in the context of stroke
• Sonothrombolysis in the absence of tPA
• Use of microbubbles for sonothrombolysis
• Ultrasound-induced drug delivery in stroke
• Neuroprotection with ultrasound with/without microbubbles
• Safety of sonothrombolysis

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/srt/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/author/submit/journals/srt/sce/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Thilo Hölscher, Department of Radiology and Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

Guest Editors

• Thomas Porter, MD, University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA
• William Culp, MD, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, USA
• David Liebeskind, MD, University of California, Los Angeles, USA