Blood Coagulation Following an Acute Ischemic Stroke

Objective. Hemostasis is a complex physiological process that stops bleeding at the site of a vascular injury. Although the majority of vascular accidents are ischemic, the role of hypercoagulable state and stroke needs further investigation. Materials and Methods. Fresh whole blood was taken from 61 acute ischemic stroke patients and compared to 18 healthy subjects and investigated with optical coherence tomography imaging after initiating coagulation. We used an OCT1300SS system (Thorlabs) and did 3D scans. We then processed the images with ImageJ. For each image mean, integrated density, skewness and kurtosis of gray values were analyzed. Results. Mean gray value and integrated intensity of sampled data showed an intrinsic difference detected with OCT. This difference was further confirmed by the data distribution analysis. Conclusions. Results suggest, that normal blood coagulation, is not a random reaction while in the case of stroke patients, the relatively symmetrical distribution of gray values brings coagulation closer randomized process.