It’s been a while since my last post, but things are starting to wrap up at the hospital. Well, for my SRP, but not for anyone else. One of the pediatric neurosurgeons, Dr. Ruzicka, has performed multiple brain surgeries in the past week, all tumor resections, and he’s been kind enough to let me watch some of them. Brain tumor resections are very long cases, as they can last for more than 8 hours. Even the set-up is much longer than most of the surgeries I’ve observed. While watching these surgeries, I was particularly fascinated by two pieces of equipment:

            The first is a technology called Stealth. To use Stealth, doctors must take an MRI of the patient pre-operatively. Then, in the operating room, the equipment technicians place a sensor next to the patient, and connect it to the Stealth machine. The surgeon can then use a tracing needle and place it in the patient, and the sensor will pick up the tracer’s position, relative to the patient’s anatomy. The screen on the Stealth machine will show where the tip of the tracing needle is with multiple angles of the MRI that was taken earlier. So during surgery, a surgeon can figure out what exactly he or she is looking at by using the Stealth technology.

            The second is the microscope that Dr. Ruzicka used during the tumor resections. It was an incredibly complicated device mounted on a 7-foot tall arm. There were 4 different pairs of eyepieces and buttons on every side of it. Before the surgeon could use it, the entire arm had to be wrapped in a sterile covering, so he would remain sterile while working with it. The equipment technicians connected it to a 3D screen, so everyone in the room could wear 3D glasses and see the surgeon’s work more clearly.

            In other news, we had a fire drill in the clinic building today. With only a couple days left of my SRP, the problem at hand is trying to fit the whole experience into a relatively short presentation.