Packard Children's Opens West Coast's Most Advanced Pediatric Surg...(s with colleagues in distant locations a...),Health

And the new rooms contain cutting-edge tools for each surgical specialty. For instance, the "BrainLAB" image guidance system in the neurosurgery OR integrates images from several types of pre-op brain scans into one super- image of the patient's brain. The integrated three-dimensional image guides surgery with a GPS-like system that tracks each surgical tool in real time and displays its location in the brain-image map.

It's hard to overstate the advance this represents for young patients who need brain or spinal surgery. "Patients live and die by their scan images," said Michael Edwards, MD, the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Packard.

For instance, if a brain tumor is located near a region of gray matter that controls movement, Edwards can pre-plan the operation and then watch his surgical tools move through images of the patient's motor cortex, obtained in a pre-surgical functional MRI scan and fiber tract map, to ensure he's not cutting a brain region that would cripple the patient. Information from other types of scans helps him see exactly where the edges of the tumor lie as he operates.

"We will be able to perform more complex, higher-risk surgeries with greater safety," Edwards said.

And, in every operating room, surgical teams now have more room to move. The new ORs average 650 square feet, 150-200 feet larger than the rooms at Stanford Hospital. Most equipment is mounted on moveable ceiling booms, which means teams can configure the rooms ergonomically for any operation.

Other new designs lessen the stress of what one family called "the surgical maze." Patients can now bypass Packard's general admitting and go straight to a surgery-specific admitting desk. They travel only a few steps for anesthesia prep, and then move to a waiting area with toys and child-sized furniture, where Child Life special
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