The Latest Neurosurgery Technologies: What are they and How are they Changing the World of Neurosurgery?

Operating on the brain used to be an inexact and often brutal science, to put it mildly. But thanks to the leaps and bounds made with the research done in this area, and the technologies underpinning it, modern neurosurgery is more effective and less invasive.

If you are out of the loop with regards to the developments in neurosurgery, let’s go through just a few of the breakthroughs that have been made recently, and what this means for the procedures and the patients themselves.

Augmented reality is here

Augmented reality, otherwise known as AR, is having an impact in all sorts of industries, from entertainment to automotive repairs and beyond.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it is proving effective in various surgical fields, and is being applied in all sorts of contexts, whether you seek neurosurgery in NJ or many parts of the country.

As the name suggests, AR makes use of a headset, tracking sensors and software to overlay digital display elements on the world in front of the user.

This enables surgeons to be guided in their actions and the placement of their instrumentation so as to improve outcomes and lessen the risks associated with working on fragile areas of the body like the brain and spine.

Mid-surgery MRI scanning enhances tumor removal

Another facet of neurosurgery which was tricky to perform perfectly in the past was that of removing brain tumors from patients in dire need.

If the actual extraction of the tumor wasn’t challenging enough from a purely mechanical standpoint, the issue of not removing enough of the affected tissue was a persistent one.

Thankfully the development of cutting edge MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) tech has enabled surgeons to perform scans while they are in the middle of the procedure, rather than only being able to do this before or afterwards.

By checking up on the patient’s brain in real time, surgeons can establish if they have adequately eliminated cancerous cells, or if it is necessary for them to keep going a little further.

Taking guesswork out of the equation means that surgeries of this kind can be carried out more efficiently and effectively, as well as offering higher long term survivability rates for those that need to go through them.

Advances in immunotherapy lessen the need for invasive surgery

In most cases, surgery is a last resort, since if patients can be treated without the need for any kind of direct surgical interaction, this is both less traumatic and less risky.

Immunotherapy is thus a technology which matters a lot to the world of neurosurgery, and it is something which is researched alongside it, especially in relation to the cancers which can lead to brain tumors and associated diseases.

While this is clearly a complex topic, the basic premise is that we can use treatments to turn our own immune systems against the cancerous cells.

This can be achieved by either boosting the immune system of the patient to strengthen it more broadly, or by specifically highlighting the cells of a tumor so that they can be attacked by the immune system in a targeted way.

Researchers are even able to engineer viruses to work with a patient’s immune system, showcasing the range of technologies and the impressive leaps forward that have been made recently.

Thus neurosurgery is a field full of innovation as well as cross-discipline collaboration, and the technologies developed here have implications throughout healthcare as well as in other industries and sectors, which makes them all the more worthwhile to pursue.