How to Interpret a Stroke CTA

The presence of a focal neurologic deficit is going to increase my pretest probability that the patient's actually having a stroke. At UW we end up doing about you know 90 to 100 stroke CTA's a month and only about 10 to 11% of those patients actually have large vessel occlusions. So having the right hemisphere is really helpful. Sometimes I find it challenging to distinguish like large vessel cortical infarx versus lacunar infarx, which can produce similar findings.