Uploaded February 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Excerpt from Brain Works 2013, a free community event from Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Register for our next brain innovation event at: bjhne.ws/xj
In this portion of the Brain Works presentation, neurosurgeons Dr. Eric Leuthardt and Dr. Albert Kim discuss the benefits of using intraoperative MRI (or iMRI) in brain tumor surgery. When removing tumors, which Drs. Kim and Leuthardt specialize in, neurosurgeons are torn between two different pressures. They want to get the tumor out, because fundamentally, the more of the tumor they take out, the better the prognosis is. But on the other side, there can be problems if too much of the brain is removed. If important areas of the brain are removed, function is compromised.
There's a lot of diversity in what our brains do and the problems that our brains face. We need tools to confront this diversity. So we have tools for every occasion. And one of these is intraoperative MRI, a tool that Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital has. There are very few iMRIs around the world, and one of them is at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
In a world without intraoperative MRI, we would rely on things like cutting-edge, state-of-the-art microscopes to remove tumors. We could remove all of the tumor that we see with these microscopes, but there is a high probability that we could miss some of the tumor. In this scenario, we wouldn't find out that part of the tumor was missed until we do a postoperative MRI the following day. Only then do we see that we missed something, so now we have to go through all of this again. It's like Groundhog Day. It's highly inefficient.
With iMRI, instead of waiting until the next day, we can find out if we missed some of that tumor while we are still in the operating room. We can do an operation, keep the patient sterile, have the intraoperative MRI come into the operating room, and then we can see how we did. This saves time, and also saves a lot of suffering for many patients. With intraoperative MRI, we are able to get out as much of the tumor as we safely can, the first time in the OR.
Excerpt from Brain Works 2013, a free community event from Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Register for our next brain innovation event at: bjhne.ws/xj
In this portion of the Brain Works presentation, neurosurgeons Dr. Eric Leuthardt and Dr. Albert Kim discuss the benefits of using intraoperative MRI (or iMRI) in brain tumor surgery. When removing tumors, which Drs. Kim and Leuthardt specialize in, neurosurgeons are torn between two different pressures. They want to get the tumor out, because fundamentally, the more of the tumor they take out, the better the prognosis is. But on the other side, there can be problems if too much of the brain is removed. If important areas of the brain are removed, function is compromised.
There's a lot of diversity in what our brains do and the problems that our brains face. We need tools to confront this diversity. So we have tools for every occasion. And one of these is intraoperative MRI, a tool that Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital has. There are very few iMRIs around the world, and one of them is at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
In a world without intraoperative MRI, we would rely on things like cutting-edge, state-of-the-art microscopes to remove tumors. We could remove all of the tumor that we see with these microscopes, but there is a high probability that we could miss some of the tumor. In this scenario, we wouldn't find out that part of the tumor was missed until we do a postoperative MRI the following day. Only then do we see that we missed something, so now we have to go through all of this again. It's like Groundhog Day. It's highly inefficient.
With iMRI, instead of waiting until the next day, we can find out if we missed some of that tumor while we are still in the operating room. We can do an operation, keep the patient sterile, have the intraoperative MRI come into the operating room, and then we can see how we did. This saves time, and also saves a lot of suffering for many patients. With intraoperative MRI, we are able to get out as much of the tumor as we safely can, the first time in the OR.
