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Cerebrovascular & Comprehensive Stroke Center

Stroke

Stroke Care Experts

While we hope that you or someone you love never experiences a stroke, it's important to know that you have the most advanced level of stroke care just minutes away at Stony Brook Cerebrovascular and Comprehensive Stroke Center.

Our hospital is the ONLY hospital in New York State to be named as one of America's 100 Best Hospitals™ by Healthgrades for stroke care for the past nine years (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), signifying our excellence in patient care.  

Our experienced, highly-trained stroke team performs all the latest procedures, 24/7. Our expertise includes the latest diagnostic tools, every FDA-approved, minimally invasive stroke intervention technique and access to major ongoing clinical trials, some not available elsewhere in the region. 

What are Ischemic and Hemorrhagic Strokes?

The outlook for people who have had a stroke is more hopeful than ever before due to advances in stroke awareness, prevention, treatment, education and rehabilitation. However, stroke remains the fifth-leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States.

There are two general categories of stroke – ischemic and hemorrhagic. Stony Brook Medicine has experts in the treatment and diagnosis of both kinds of stroke.

  • Ischemic stroke: An ischemic stroke occurs when an artery that supplies blood flow to the brain becomes blocked or severely narrowed (or “stenotic”). Blockage of a brain artery can result from a blood clot traveling from someplace else in the circulatory system (“a thromboembolus or embolus”). It can also result from plaque build-up in the brain artery itself (i.e., “hardening of the arteries” or “intracranial atherosclerotic disease”), which causes a narrowing of the artery.
     
  • Hemorrhagic stroke: Refers to any condition resulting in bleeding within or around the brain. Bleeding within the brain can be caused by high blood pressure (a hypertensive hemorrhage), blood-thinning medications, from underlying disease in the brain’s small blood vessels (e.g., amyloid angiopathy), and from brain aneurysms and vascular malformations (e.g., AVMs, cavernous malformations).

The Comprehensive Stroke Center Difference

Since 2018, Stony Brook University Hospital has maintained its designation as a certified Comprehensive Stroke Center (CSC) by The Joint Commission, the nation's oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. This certification is achieved by only 3 percent of hospitals nationwide and speaks to our exemplary level of stroke care.  

The CSC certification is the highest level a stroke center can achieve and involves a rigorous screening process. This advanced designation indicates our ability to receive and treat the most complex stroke cases. As a certified comprehensive stroke center, Stony Brook provides nationally recognized best practices and a level of care few hospitals anywhere can match. Nationally approximately only 200 hospitals out of 5,800 have earned this certification.

To be eligible, hospitals must first demonstrate compliance with stroke-related standards.  Our center had been a New York State Department of Health designated Stroke Center since 2005 and a Joint Commission-certified Advanced Primary Stroke Center since 2004.

Additional requirements include:

  • Advanced imaging capabilities (Stony Brook offers magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)/magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), computed tomography angiography (CTA), digital subtraction angiography (DSA), and transcranial doppler ultrasound (TCD)
  • 24/7 availability of specialized treatments, operating room and endovascular facilities and staff with the unique education and competencies to care for complex stroke patients (training in vascular neurology, neurosurgery and endovascular procedures)
  • Experience and expertise in treating volume of patients with large ischemic strokes, intracerebral hemorrhage and subarachnoid hemorrhage
  • Ability to deliver physical, occupational and speech therapy every day of the week
  • Follow up with patients on their outpatient care
  • Community education outreach to local residents about preventing and recognizing strokes
  • Tracking performance and defined quality improvement programs to maximize positive outcomes of stroke patients, especially for the most complicated cases

All of these requirements and measures are designed to help hospital teams create a loyal and cohesive clinical team, establish a consistent approach to care, reduce the variation and risk of error, and demonstrate a commitment to a higher standard of clinical service.

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