MR Surgical Suite helps improve pediatric neurosurgery

Neurosurgeons at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital (Salt Lake City, Utah) are now able to use a SIGNA™ Artist with the MR Surgical Suite option, an MR scanner adapted for intraoperative imaging. With this solution, the neurosurgeons can clearly see deep inside the brain during surgeries, helping kids with severe seizures and protecting kids’ healthy brain tissue when removing tumors.

The MR Surgical Suite option allows neurosurgeons to scan a patient’s brain and make needed adjustments in the middle of surgery. Intraoperative MR-assisted surgeries can be less invasive for children, helping reduce risks.

With the new system at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, doctors can use intraoperative MR to remove brain tumors with greater precision and leave more healthy brain tissue untouched, which is critical to a growing child and their future development.

“Using this system, I come into every surgery more confident that we’re going to get all of the tumor out the first time and not need follow-up procedures,” said Samuel Cheshier, MD, neurosurgeon at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital. “These brain scans give us realtime data to ensure there aren’t parts of the tumor tissue lingering.”

Robert Bollo, MD, a neurosurgeon at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, also uses the real-time brain scans to safely treat overactive neurons in patients with seizures. Dr. Bollo and his team use a ROSA ONE® Brain robot to insert a laser deep into the brain where the neurons trigger seizure episodes. Once in place, the patient is moved to the SIGNA™ Artist, where the surgeon can see in real-time the active parts of the brain where the laser is working. The heat removes some neurons, which leads to fewer seizures, and doctors use the MR Surgical Suite to precisely move the laser to other areas of the brain.