Prof. Hans Henkes. Courtesy of DRG/Thomas Ralafzyk.

In March 2008, Henkes successfully performed stroke treatment for the first time with a self-expanding "solitaire" stent. In the following years, his group found that so-called "stent retriever thrombectomy" proved to be superior to all previous therapeutic methods for the elimination of acute occlusion of large cerebral arteries in randomized trials.

The award ceremony took place during the recent German Congress of Radiology in Wiesbaden, where Henkes gave a lecture about the endovascular stroke treatment.