Here at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University, I am blessed to be able to work with a large group of neurosurgery colleagues, each of which has special expertise and brings a special way about them that makes the whole department of neurosurgery greater.

My field of neurosurgery, especially specializing on conditions of the blood vessels of the brain, again those are areas like brain aneurysms, vascular malformations that patients are born with, it also is stroke and carotid disease that can lead to stroke.

We are using technology or approaches that are less invasive than we used to. One way is the use of catheters or small tubes that are inserted into the blood vessel in the groin area and then threaded up into the brain area and inside the aneurysm to treat that aneurysm without the use of an incision or leaving any kind of scar that anyone would see.

At the same time, there are some brain aneurysms that still require open surgery and we’re developing better ways to do that surgery – smaller incisions, smaller openings – and done in a way that patients can literally go to the hospital for their procedure, have their aneurysm surgically treated and able to go home a day or 2 days later to get back to their life and recover much more rapidly and with better outcomes.