Record Number of Viewers Watch Dr. Joseph Madsen Use Powerful Imaging Techniques During Complete Brain Tumor Resection
Nearly 5,500 viewers tuned in on Wednesday, Oct. 25, to watch Dr. Joseph Russell Madsen, neurosurgeon at Children's Hospital and Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, assisted by a multidisciplinary team from Children’s Hospital, remove a brain tumor employing functional mapping of the cortex on a 13-year-old pediatric patient during a live webcast from Children’s Hospital Boston. To access the archived webcast, click
http://www.or-live.com/childrenshospitalboston/1360/

This event featured the most advanced imaging techniques being used by neurosurgeons today. Thousands of families and health-care providers watched Dr. Madsen use an intraoperative MRI system, which captures digital images of the patient through a ceiling-mounted camera, to perform a microsurgical resection of an oligodendroglioma, a low-grade tumor arising from glial cells in the central nervous system. (For more information on oligodendroglioma tumors, click here.)

After remaining in intensive care for a few days, the unidentified patient is expected to leave the hospital in about a week.

Functional brain mapping techniques used before and during neurosurgical procedures ensure the safest possible therapy for brain tumors by helping doctors determine the relationship between the critical brain areas and the tumor(s). Using these “roadmaps,” a neurosurgeon is able to remove all or part of a brain tumor without jeopardizing healthy brain tissue, even in those cases where the tumor is located in an eloquent area.

The Brain Science Foundation is proud to support advancements in this critical research area through our Image-Guided Surgery and Brain Mapping Research Portfolio. This funding supports BWH’s Dr. Alex Golby’s work in further developing these cutting-edge techniques, which are being increasingly used by neurosurgeons during surgical planning and in the operating room and, which, consequently, are having a significant impact on healthy patient outcomes as well as the quality of life for brain tumor patients. (For more information on Dr. Golby’s Image Guided Surgery and Brain Mapping project, click here.)

A Brain Science Foundation Advisory Board Member, Dr. Joseph R. Madsen is a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is the Director of the Neurosurgical Clinic at Children’s and specializes in the surgical treatment of epilepsy as well as the pathophysiology and treatment of hydrocephalus. As director of the Neurodynamics Laboratory at the two hospitals, he brings a bioengineering and mathematical approach to the study of the basic science of these entities, as well as innovative devices to advance their treatment.