Cranial Temperature Early Diagnose Hemorrhagic and Ischemic Stroke

The cerebrovascular diseases can be approximately divided as two types, namely ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. Intravenous thrombolysis within 3-4.5 hours is highly recommended for acute ischemic stroke patients. But it's difficult to diagnose the ischemic stroke with the hemorrhagic stroke from the early symptoms and signs. It's with high risk of enlarging the hematoma if the patients with hemorrhagic stroke received the thrombolytic drugs. And time cost by CT or MRI examination is likely to responsible for missing the narrow time window and poor prognosis of stroke patients. Consequently, seeking for a noninvasive, rapid, portable and inexpensive diagnosis method which can sensitively distinguish the stroke type before CT or MRI examination would be very helpful in treating the ischemic stroke patients. Because of the blockage in the cerebral supply artery, the heat from circulatory system will sharply decrease in infracted hemisphere among the ischemic stroke patients. The reduced brain temperature influenced the temperature on the ipsilateral forehead according to the data of our animal and preliminary clinical trial. In contrast, the temperature of the ipsilateral hemisphere showed a mild increase among the ischemic stroke patients in our preliminary experiment. The difference of the temperature tendency on the ipsilateral forehead has a great chance to be an early physical mark. In our study, 30 ischemic stroke patients and 30 hemorrhagic stroke patients will be recruited. In the process of recruitment, the patients with acute stroke attack in no more than 4.5 hours will be collected the temperature at the five point without head coverage, including ipsilateral tempora, ipsilateral forehead, galbella, contralateral forehead, and contralateral tempora. Then the stroke would be recruited into the ischemic and hemorrhagic group according to the later CT or MRI results in the hospital. The accuracy and sensibility of early brain temperature in distinguishing stroke type would be tested in comparison with the diagnosis of imaging examination.