Thrombectomy is a revolutionary stroke treatment where the offending clot is literally sucked out of the patient’s brain.

I performed my first thrombectomy in 2006, but I remember it as though it was yesterday.

I was working as a junior doctor in the catheter laboratory at Saarland University Hospital in Germany when a call came in from Professor Klaus Fassbender, the head of the neurology department.

He told me that a 42-year-old soldier had just been admitted, suffering from a severe stroke.