A 70-year-old man came to an emergency department after a fall. His first brain CT scan looked normal. But his eyes were doing something unusual: they drifted slowly from one side to the other and back again, a pattern known as ping-pong gaze.
What made the finding stranger was that he was awake and oriented. The sign is classically seen in people in a coma. MRI later revealed a stroke on both sides of the thalamus, a deep brain region fed in his case by a single small vessel called the artery of Percheron. The case was published in February 2026 in Radiology Case Reports by Md. Deluwar Hussen and Zareen Tabassum.
