Delhi: Awake Brain Surgery performed to remove tumour while patient continued on conference call

By Joymala Bagchi
New Delhi [India], Aug 20 (ANI): Neurosurgeons operated on one Rahul Gupta and removed a tumour from his brain while the 24-year-old busied himself with a live conference-call from his office here on Wednesday.
Doctors operated and removed a 4cm X 4cm tumour from Gupta's brain in a procedure termed as 'Awake Craniotomy' or Awake Brain Surgery, which is typically performed while the patient remains awake.
A team comprising Doctors Mukesh Pandey, Pankaj Dawar and Gaurav Kesri from the department of Neurosurgery team and Doctors R K Singh, Manish Pahuja from the Department of Anesthesia of Sarvodaya Healthcare removed the brain tumour while the patient was fully awake and conscious.
Located in the motor area of the right side of the brain (responsible for controlling movement and coordination of the left side of the body) the tumour resulted in multiple seizures in a very short span of time in the patient.
Dr Rakesh Gupta, Chairman of Sarvodaya Healthcare, Faridabad, said, "We are living in an ever-changing era of technology, whether it is in medical science or it in our daily life, we need to adapt ourselves to that and bring the best out of it."
Dr Mukesh Pandey, Senior Consultant, neurosurgery said, "the major advantage of performing Awake Brain Surgery is that we can monitor the patient live and any malfunction can be handled in real-time."
"Local anesthesia works for four hours only and the entire surgery needs to be completed within that time frame. So given the very short window, we aim to remove the tumour completely but sometimes, we might need to leave a small part of the tumour to avoid any permanent damage to the patient. And later we can remove that small portion with SRS (Stereotactic Radio Surgery)," explains Dr Pankaj Dawar, Senior Consultant and Dr Gaurav Kesri, Associate Consultant, Centre for Brain and Spine.
The benefit of advanced neurosurgery techniques is the patient can do normal activities within two hours of the surgery. (ANI)