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Asked by Margauxrabbit to Adrian, Iroise, Joe, Rachel, Ria on 4 Nov 2016.
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Joe Bathelt answered on 4 Nov 2016:
There are specially trained medical doctors that carry out operations in the brain. Operations in the brain are sometimes necessary to treat conditions that affect the brain, like bleeding following injury, certain types of cancer, or severe epilepsy. I’m not an expert on this, but I assume that the duration of the operation depends on the goal. If it is an easy operation, e.g. like removing some tissue from the surface of the brain, then it should be quicker. In contrast, surgery deep within the brain would require longer, because the surgeons will need to be very careful to not damage anything on the way in.
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Iroise Dumontheil answered on 6 Nov 2016:
Yes you can operate on the brain, for example this can be needed when someone has a tumour that needs to be removed, or when there is a blood vessel that is bleeding and needs to be closed, or when someone has had an accident and something got into their head and needs to be removed. Brain surgeons are the type of doctors who operate on the brain, and as Joe said how long it takes depends on how urgent the operation is, and how complicated it is.
Another type of operation that is done is when people have epilepsy, which means they have brain seizures regularly. Sometimes no medicine works to reduce or stop the seizures happening, and so instead doctors decide to try to remove the part of the brain where the seizure is starting from. To do this, they would open the skull of a patient and put electrodes on the surface of the brain, and over a couple of days record the electrical activity to try to figure out exactly where the seizures are coming from. Often they also want to check what this particular region of the brain is doing in this person, in part because they want to avoid removing brain tissue that is really important, for example the part of the brain that enables us to talk.
Sometimes also researchers ask these patients, while they have electrodes on the surface of their brain, whether they would agree to take part in an experiment, where the researchers would for example show them pictures, or words, and measure the electrical activity in their brain. This type of studies is very rare of course but can give researchers more information that when we record the electrical signal on the scalp, where it’s a lot less precise.
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Ria Vaportzis answered on 7 Nov 2016:
I personally cannot operate the brain as this is a job of a brain surgeon or neurosurgeon. As with any other type of surgery the hours can vary depending on the nature of the operation.
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