By Eike Struck
PhD student at TREC
Heart attack, stroke and blockage of veins are responsible for a quarter of annual deaths worldwide. Common to all those conditions is the development of a blood clot (thrombosis) in the blood vessels before the event occurs. The current detection methods for thrombosis are catheterization, computer tomography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These techniques sometimes fail to detect the clot or incorrectly identify a clot where there is none present, especially in the cases of sudden events.