Bengaluru, November 17 (IANS). Doctors at Bengaluru’s Bhagwan Mahavir Jain Hospital have successfully performed brain surgery on an American musician. Interestingly, the patient was allowed to play the guitar during the surgery.
Los Angeles resident Joseph D’Souza (65) was suffering from a disease called ‘Guitarist Dystonia’. There is no known cure for this disease. Joseph lived with the condition for nearly 20 years and struggled to make this small improvement in his nerve.
Stereotactic and functional neurosurgeon Dr. Sharan Srinivasan of PRS Neurosciences, Bhagwan Mahavir Jain Hospital and senior neurologist and movement disorder specialist Dr. Sanjeev CC successfully treated a patient suffering from guitarist dystonia.
Dr. Sharan Srinivasan said that MRI guided stereotactic neurosurgery is performed by specialized surgeons, called ‘functional neurosurgeons’.
He explained, “We performed VO thalamotomy using RF (radio frequency) current. This means destroying or ‘burning out’ a circuit inside the brain. In this live surgery, the patient remains completely unconscious during the entire seven-hour procedure. kind of has to stay awake – this involves fixing a titanium, stereotactic frame to the head, with two screws at the front and two screws at the back of the head, which is screwed into his skull and then a special part of the brain ‘Stereotactic MRI’ is captured.”
“Next, these MRI images are loaded into specialized software, in which potential ‘misfunctioning brain circuits’ are identified and mapped,” he said. Once the ventral oralis nucleus, located deep inside the brain, The motor, which is in the thalamus, is targeted and the entry point determined on the head/skull, the software then calculates the ‘X-Y-Z coordinates’ of both the target and the entry point. “
He said that in Joseph’s case the distance from the entry point to the target was 10 cm.
He said, “As soon as the aiming point was stimulated, Joseph experienced slight numbness/paresthesia in the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand! And these were his problem fingers! This meant that we could accurately aim.” Were successful in identifying it.”
After this, seven ‘burns’ of 40 seconds each were given. Only after the fifth ‘burn’ did the patient say he was feeling normal. Now he needs neuro rehabilitation for one to three months.
–IANS
FZ/AKJ
