Introduction of department
Department of Neurosurgery, Hiroshima University Hospital (HUH) was established on September of 1974 and started its clinical service from April of 1975 by Professor Emeritus Tohru UOZUMI. He managed the department for 20 years. During the period, the department has been grown to cover brain tumors (especially hypothalamo-pituitary tumors, neuroepithelial tumors), cerebrovascular diseases (cerebral aneurysms, arteriovenous malformations, ischemic cerebral diseases), head trauma and so on. From April of 1995, Professor Kaoru KURISU has been managing the department till now. He expanded the fields of neurosurgical treatment to deal with spinal surgery (spinal tumors, degenerative diseases, spinal vascular malformations ), functional neurosurgery (epilepsy surgery, stereotactic neurosurgery, and so on) and neuro-endovascular surgery (coil embolization, carotid artery stenting and so on) additionally mentioned above. During these 5 years, almost all neurosurgical diseases have become able to be treated in HUH. Now related patients are transferred to HUH from wide range of Chugoku-Shikoku Area. Hiroshima University Hospital is the only ONE university hospital in Hiroshima Prefecture to educate medicine. So, it is crucial for us to educate and cultivate the next generation of neurosurgeons. We are doing almost all of neurosurgical operations with monitoring such as motor and sensory evoked potential (MEP, SEP), cranial nerve monitoring, near infrared spectoloscopy and so on to reserve neuronal function and achieve complete treatment. We introduced basic SCOT in April 2016 as the first case in the world.
Research content
In research we perform the intraoperative monitoring, intractable epilepsy, clinical research of CVD, basic research of gene therapy for malignant brain tumor, therapy and identification of tumor stem cell of pituitary adenoma, regeneration for central nervous system. From May 2016, we started SCOT (Smart Cyber Operating Theater) which is “information integrated” operating theater. First we did make package of related operative machines and tools. Second, we did collect synchronous and simultaneous information from each machine and monitor on one platform using a kind of interface of ORiN (open resources interface for networking). One of the final aim of this system is to construct new interface as OPeLink. As translational research, we are doing basic research using cranial bone derived mesenchymal stem cells as cell therapy to the central nervous system disease.
Treatment achievements
In 2017, we performed total 377 surgical cases per year. Brain tumor 164 cases, CVD 107 cases, FN 29 cases, spine 13 cases, head trauma 18 cases, others (hydrocephalus, congenital abnormality, and infections, etc.) 23 cases. We performed total 35 cases using SCOT system including brain tumor, intractable epilepsy, bone tumor till the end of September 2018.