New hope for Parkinson's patients?

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>> This is what we use to aim the electrode into the brain.

>> My name is Elister Martin assumed spelling and I'm an engineering scientist in the Department of Radiology at the University of California in San Francisco.

>> So we can take this put it right there in the center here. And I am Dr. Paul Larson assumed spelling I'm a neurosurgeon at the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF. Our focus now is on deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease.

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>> The traditional method of implanting DBS is to do an awake brain operation to place a frame of the patients head then take them to the operating room and perform about a 6 to 8 hour procedure where the patient is awake, has to undergo a brain mapping procedure where multiple penetrations are made in the brain to localize the correct target to place the DBS electrode and then close up and take the patient to MRI and see if the electrodes are in the right place and that's a tedious, time consuming procedure to undergo and its difficult for some patients to tolerate.

>> We're presently working on a new system for implanting deep brain stimulators in the brain by using direct image guidance during surgery so rather than the patient coming to the MR scanner before surgery and then returning after surgery we attempt to do the entire procedure within the bore of the magnet when we can make pictures during the progress of a surgical procedure. The magnetic resonance environment is a particularly challenging one because you cannot bring in any materials that are ferrous or might be attracted by the magnet itself. So we had to make sure that what we developed was something that we could work safely in the MR space with and it was also something that we could work with somewhat remotely because we'll be keeping the patient in the center of the bore of the magnet and so it's not very easy to access the patient and thus you need to be able to have devices that allow you to work for more or a less an arms reach away.

>> There are several advantages; the patient does not have to be awake during the procedure so it's much more comfortable from the standpoint. Because we can use real time image guidance during the procedure we generally can place the electrodes with just 1 penetration of the brain. The procedure time is cut by about 50% and we have the ability to immediately detect any complications. We do think and hope this does become the new gold standard. We do believe that this new technique has a lot of significant advantages and may really be a paradigm shift in the way we do DBS surgery.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====