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Updated: Mar 13, 2026
Minimally Invasive Endoscopic Intracerebral Hemorrhage Evacuation
Published on: October 15, 2021
ICES (Intraoperative Stereotactic Computed Tomography-Guided Endoscopic Surgery) for Brain Hemorrhage: A Multicenter
Paul Vespa1, Daniel Hanley2, Joshua Betz2
1From the Departments of Neurosurgery and Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (P.V., J.S., N. Martin); Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (D.H., J.B., A.B.-H., K.L., N. McBee, R.E.T.); Department of Neurosurgery, Case Western University (A.H., W.S.); Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pittsburgh, PA (J.E., P.N.); Department of Neurosurgery, University of California, San Diego (R.C.); Department of Neurosurgery, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (C.O.); and Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA (J.J.). Pvespa@mednet.ucla.edu.
Background And Purpose:
Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a devastating disease without a proven therapy to improve long-term outcome. Considerable controversy about the role of surgery remains. Minimally invasive endoscopic surgery for ICH offers the potential of improved neurological outcome.
Methods:
We tested the hypothesis that intraoperative computerized tomographic image-guided endoscopic surgery is safe and effectively removes the majority of the hematoma rapidly. A prospective randomized controlled study was performed on 20 subjects (14 surgical and 4 medical) with primary ICH of >20 mL volume within 48 hours of ICH onset. We prospectively used a contemporaneous medical control cohort (n=36) from the MISTIE trial (Minimally Invasive Surgery and r-tPA for ICH Evacuation). We evaluated surgical safety and neurological outcomes at 6 months and 1 year.
Results:
The intraoperative computerized tomographic image-guided endoscopic surgery procedure resulted in immediate reduction of hemorrhagic volume by 68±21.6% (interquartile range 59-84.5) within 29 hours of hemorrhage onset. Surgery was successfully completed in all cases, with a mean operative time of 1.9 hours (interquartile range 1.5-2.2 hours). One surgically related bleed occurred peri-operatively, but no patient met surgical safety stopping threshold end points for intraoperative hemorrhage, infection, or death. The surgical intervention group had a greater percentage of patients with good neurological outcome (modified Rankin scale score 0-3) at 180 and 365 days as compared with medical control subjects (42.9% versus 23.7%; P=0.19).
Conclusions:
Early computerized tomographic image-guided endoscopic surgery is a safe and effective method to remove acute intracerebral hematomas, with a potential to enhance neurological recovery.
Clinical Trial Registration:
URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT00224770.
