http://www.nucleushealth.com/ - This 3D medical animation depicts two operations, called craniotomy and craniectomy, in which the skull is opened to access the brain. The normal anatomy of the skull and tissues surrounding the brain are shown, including arteries and veins. The animation lists the common reasons for these procedures, and briefly introduces intracranial pressure.

Video ID: ANH13109


Transcript:

Your doctor may recommend a craniotomy or a craniectomy procedure to treat a number of different brain diseases, injuries, or conditions.

Your skull is made of bone and serves as a hard, protective covering for your brain. Just inside your skull, three layers of tissue, called meninges, surround your brain. The thick, outermost layer is the dura mater. The middle tissue layer is the arachnoid mater and the innermost layer is the pia mater. Between the arachnoid mater and the pia mater is the subarachnoid space, which contains blood vessels and a clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. Blood vessels, called bridging veins, connect the surface of your brain with the dura mater. Other blood vessels, called cerebral arteries, bring blood to your brain.

Inside your skull, normal brain function requires a delicate balance of pressure between the blood in your blood vessels, the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds your brain, and your brain tissue. This is called normal intracranial pressure. Increased intracranial pressure may result from: brain tumors, head injuries, problems with your blood vessels, or infections in your brain or spinal cord. These conditions put pressure on your brain and may cause it to swell or change shape inside your skull, which can lead to serious brain injury.

Your doctor may recommend a craniotomy to remove: abnormal brain tissue, such as a brain tumor, a sample of tissue by biopsy, a blood clot, called a hematoma, excess cerebrospinal fluid, or pus from an infection, called an abscess.

A craniotomy may also be done to: relieve brain swelling,
stop bleeding, called a hemorrhage, repair abnormal blood vessels, repair skull fractures, or repair damaged meninges.

Finally, a craniotomy may also be done to: treat brain conditions, such as epilepsy, deliver medication to your brain, or implant a medical device, such as a deep brain stimulator.

The most common reason for a craniotomy is to remove a brain tumor.

#Craniotomy #Craniectomy #BrainSurgery

Dr. Akshay Syal takes us to NYU Langone Health where new A.I. technology is diagnosing brain tumors in record time, which opens the doors to possible new life-saving treatments.

» Subscribe to NBC News: http://nbcnews.to/SubscribeToNBC
» Watch more NBC video: http://bit.ly/MoreNBCNews

NBC News Digital is a collection of innovative and powerful news brands that deliver compelling, diverse and engaging news stories. NBC News Digital features NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, TODAY.com, Nightly News, Meet the Press, Dateline, and the existing apps and digital extensions of these respective properties. We deliver the best in breaking news, live video coverage, original journalism and segments from your favorite NBC News Shows.

Connect with NBC News Online!
NBC News App: https://smart.link/5d0cd9df61b80
Breaking News Alerts: https://link.nbcnews.com/join/....5cj/breaking-news-si
Visit NBCNews.Com: http://nbcnews.to/ReadNBC
Find NBC News on Facebook: http://nbcnews.to/LikeNBC
Follow NBC News on Twitter: http://nbcnews.to/FollowNBC
Get more of NBC News delivered to your inbox: nbcnews.com/newsletters

#NBCNews #AI #Cancer

Alexandra J. Golby, MD, Director, Image-guided Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, discusses technological advancements to improve the precision of surgery to remove brain tumors.

It’s estimated that each year nearly 80,000 people are diagnosed with primary brain tumors and 100,000 with metastatic brain tumors. Nearly everybody is at risk for developing a brain tumor. Brain tumors can affect people from childhood to the last years of their lives. Men are slightly more affected than women and the causes of most brain tumors are not known.

There are a number of unique challenges in treating brain tumors. One challenge is that primary tumors can have indistinct margins that are difficult to see. Another challenge is that the tissue around a brain tumor is uniquely important and may impact things like language, visual and motor function.

The AMIGO Suite, opened in 2011 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is the Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating Suite. It's an NIH-funded national center which was developed with the goal of translating technological advances into improvements in surgical and interventional care for patients. In the AMIGO Suite, there is an intraoperative MRI scanner which can be brought in and out of the operating room during surgery to help surgeons visualize a patient’s tumor better.

Image-guided surgery uses the information obtained from advanced imaging and translates that into the planning and execution of surgery by acquiring high resolution and specialty structural images of the brain and also functional images of the brain. These images can be registered to one another and then to the patient's head during surgery. This allows surgeons to pinpoint the location of the tumor as well as the areas that we would like to preserve, areas that serve critical brain functions are located.

One of the big challenges, even with image-guided surgery, is that as we perform the surgery, the configuration of the brain is changing, and we call that brain shift. And it's due to changes in the brain itself and also as we remove tissue, things are constantly shifting and moving. When we're talking about doing brain tumor surgery, a few millimeters of movement can be a big difference. How to measure and track brain shift is an important area of research and a number of technologies are being studied to understand how to measure brain shift during surgery.

The development of various intraoperative imaging technologies allows surgeons to provide the most accurate surgical treatment for each individual patient.

Learn more about precision brain surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital:
https://www.brighamandwomens.o....rg/neurosurgery/brai