The Section of Neuroradiology is highly committed to research and is closely networked with other national and international high-performance neuroradiology centers as well as scientific institutes and industrial partners. Neuroradiology supervises more than 15 doctoral students and publishes an average of 30 scientific papers annually in high-ranking international journals. Through close scientific and technical cooperation with the manufacturers of the equipment, the expert knowledge of the individual scientists and the personnel structures of a university hospital, neuroradiology at the University Hospital of Cologne is generally far ahead of the general basic care of patients. However, the Institute's infrastructure allows the current state of knowledge to be incorporated into evidence-based and guideline-oriented clinical work.

As in the clinical field, the interventional treatment of vascular diseases in the head and spine (in particular aneurysms and AVMs) is a focus of neuroradiology research. Here, treatment procedures, material safety, innovative treatment concepts and the improvement of the clinical outcome of treatment are constantly being investigated in detail and improved for use on patients. Current research projects in this area are, for example, investigating new methods for imaging these diseases using CT and MRI. For example, the blood flow in the aneurysm is simulated in order to test the effectiveness of implants.

Materials research is primarily dedicated to the latest and future generations of medical instruments for stroke and aneurysm treatment. These are evaluated in several steps and studies. Particular attention is paid to stents for the treatment of intracranial aneurysms, which are also investigated in long-term follow-up studies, as well as the interaction of blood clots and stents

The technological possibilities of CT and MRI are far from exhausted. There is still a lot of potential for improvement in several areas, such as the speed at which scans are performed or the reduction of artifacts. Especially in emergency situations, it is important to achieve fast and high-quality imaging. Our research group is therefore working on optimal imaging and treatment algorithms for the emergency treatment of strokes as well as techniques to improve the quality of cerebral perfusion imaging that are particularly robust to patient movement and the lack of good cardiac function.

There is a separate research group for the application of artificial intelligence methods in neuroradiology.