Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity
Delivering the best care for children
When it comes to conditions that affect the brain, complex surgery can be life-changing but also carries risks. Precision is paramount and image-guided surgery helps by tracking the position of surgical instruments during operations. Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals. Their neurology and neurosurgery teams are world-class but need access to state-of-the-art medical equipment to deliver the best care to children.
Two of GOSH’s Stealth Image Guidance Systems, used for image-guided surgery, needed replacing. We are delighted to have contributed £79,556.04 towards the cost of replacing these machines so that children at GOSH have access to the least invasive, and most effective treatments available, giving them the best chance at fulfilling their future potential.
- Every day, around 750 seriously ill children and young people are seen at GOSH from all over the UK for life-changing treatment and care
- Over 1,000 paediatric neurosurgical operations are carried out each year at GOSH
- Every day 336 operations are performed at GOSH
Seeing during surgery
The new Medtronic Stealth Image Guidance Systems will be used in hundreds of neurosurgical procedures including to treat fluid on the brain, tumours, epilepsy, craniofacial conditions, endoscopy and vascular malformations. They reduce risk by allowing surgeons to see accurately where the surgical instrument is in the brain during surgery. An electromagnetic field tracks the instruments so the child’s head doesn’t need to be fixed in a head-holder.
As image-guided surgery allows surgeons to be more precise, safer and more efficient, it can help reduce the chance of further surgery, for example in cases of incomplete tumour resections. Image guidance systems allow surgeons to plan the safest route to the affected area and keep the entry point as small as possible, giving patients the highest quality of care.
“Image guidance systems are essential to help us find the abnormality that we want to remove: a brain tumour, a malformation of the blood vessels of the brain, or an abnormal part of the brain that is causing epilepsy. Using these systems, we can locate these abnormalities accurately without disturbing any other part of the brain, plan the safest trajectory to them, and make sure that the opening we make to reach them is in the correct place and as small as possible.”
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