Oh, what a time to be alive! In the thrilling world of neurosurgery, where the distal anterior cerebral artery aneurysms play a stellar role in the “hard-to-reach” category, some brainy folks decided to play a high-stakes game of “Clip the Aneurysm” with a twist—using CT navigation. Because, you know, doing it the old-fashioned way is just too mainstream.

So, they gathered a bunch of data from the past—because who needs real-time research when you can just dig through old files? They found 139 lucky participants who had their brains tinkered with between January 2013 and November 2021 at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University. Criteria for joining this exclusive club included having a DACA aneurysm (congrats!), complete clinical data (no missing pieces, please), and a craniotomy for aneurysm clipping (party hats were optional).

But wait, there’s more! They had a list of exclusions too, because not everyone can join the fun. If you had an aneurysm recurrence, a history of traumatic brain injury or surgery, blood disorders, recent anticoagulant use, or severe organ dysfunction, you were out of the club.

After collecting all the juicy details like gender, age, and how much blood you lost during this brainy adventure, they split the group into the “navigation” team and the “traditional” team. And guess what? The navigation group lost less blood (because apparently, CT scans are not just for finding your lost car keys). But the traditional group found the aneurysm faster (old school still has some tricks up its sleeve).

In the end, both groups left the hospital with similar “How am I feeling?” scores, which means that despite the fancy tech, everyone was pretty much in the same boat prognosis-wise. But hey, the CT navigation-assisted surgery might just be the next best thing since sliced bread—or at least since the last medical breakthrough that promised to change the world.