The Importance of Assessment in a Neurosurgical Setting

The other thing that you can do is bilateral occlusion of the carotid arteries, which looks unfortunately like you're strangling the patient. It's unclear with this maneuver exactly what the success rate is and anecdotally people report different success rates with it. So in the bad old days, we would close up and hope for the best. The next iteration of this was that they would do a post operative angiogram, typically a day or two after surgery to assess filling. Then somebody had the bright idea that we could do this intraoperatively.