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Man plays his saxophone through 9-hour complex brain surgery to remove tumor
- Anunayj 4y agoMakes a small change > npm run test 38/48 tests passed, 10 failed. Ah schmutz, looks like we made a mistake > git revert
- SeanAnderson 4y agoI never quite fully grasped the purpose of having patients stay engaged during brain operations. Is it possible to undo a brain incision? If not, what good is it to know a patient's abilities are degraded after having made a cut? Is it just to mitigate compounding unexpected damage?
- roflc0ptic 4y agoYou don’t make more cuts there
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt’s not binary. You go slowly, and stop if it’s starting to impact the behavior you’re observing.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoWhat’s the alternative, knowing that you’re working with a system with unknown specific architecture and whose only way you can get feedback about how you’re doing is via the patient? You can stimulate parts of the brain without damaging it btw. The surgeon just needs to know what that part is specifically.
- jac241 4y agoYou electrically stimulate around the spot with a probe where you’re planning to resect. If the patient can’t perform whatever task you’re evaluating then you know you can’t resect in that area. Generally looking for a 1cm margin between tissue you’re going to resect and a positive stim site. Can’t undo brain cuts. CNS neurons don’t repair themselves like peripheral neurons or your skin. Generally not cutting glioma brain tumors out per se more likely to use ultrasonic aspiration to suck the tumor out piecemeal. Depends on the tumor though.
- SeanAnderson 4y agoOh, that makes sense. Cool that we can "dry run" explore with electric pulses! Thanks for explaining :)
- infogulch 4y ago"dry run" is a great analogy!
- elteto 4y agoFascinating! What is ultrasonic aspiration and how does it work?
- amelius 4y agoHow do you know what task to evaluate? And what if this was not a saxophone player, but a tennis player? Or both?
- Firmwarrior 4y agoThe worst is when you're performing brain surgery on a brain surgeon. The operating theater can get really crowded.
- cfu28 4y agoOperating theater overflow :)
- guynamedloren 4y agoOkay, this was a good one!
- rurban 4y agoWith our brain surgery robot the brain surgeon can definitely perform brain surgery on himself. Or invite a fellow brain surgeon over the phone, well a tablet might work better. Or better VR 3d glasses.
- 4y ago
- vanattab 4y agoWell you can definitely stop cutting deeper if you know something is up!
- locallost 4y agoOthers have explained, but what I've heard from a brain surgeon on TV: it's extremely delicate and they don't always know how deep they can go, so they probe bit by bit and when they notice it's having an effect they stop. The surgeon I listened to was also a gifted storyteller, it was very very impressive and inspiring. That's really a hell of a job.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- throwoutway 4y ago> The doctor said his patient, who has been identified only as C.Z., played the theme song from the 1970 movie "Love Story," and the Italian national anthem, at various times throughout the surgery. FWIW, it was not the entire 9 hours, but still cool though. I guess I read the headline wrong and thought it was during the whole operation
- tomcam 4y agoYeah I'd get tired of that theme within say 7.5 hours
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThough I cognitively understand why it's the case, the fact that operating on the brain isn't painful still weirds me out. Something about the part of the body that processes pain not feeling pain feels bizarre even though I can see why there'd be no benefit to having pain receptors there.
- dheera 4y agoWouldn't it be excruciatingly painful to get to the brain though? Or is there a way to locally anaesthetize so that you don't feel your scalp being sliced open and your skull being cracked open?
- speedylight 4y agoI think that it’s less about the pain because yeah you could probably use some sort of a local anesthetic for the scalp tissue, but I can’t imagine what all the vibrations and sounds passing through skull feels like, especially when power tools are used to drill into the skull or cut out a small section.
- sudhirj 4y agoIf the drill is medical grade and extremely fast, you might not feel any vibrations at all, almost like a laser. Should feel like a scrape more than anything.
- OJFord 4y agoI don't know what you (personally) imagine when you say 'medical grade', but surgery (other than robots and keyhole I suppose) is pretty brutal and mechanical. A 'medical-grade drill' is basically whatever's been approved for medical use, not (necessarily, though I don't doubt they exist) something special that isn't also sold for drilling masonry.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
- bjoli 4y agoThat dude has steel lips. I am a professional bassoon player, and playing anything for 9 hours straight would make my lips bleed. Edit: I apparently skimmed the article too skimmily.
- yur3i__ 4y agoI don't imagine it was 9 straight hours but like a song an hour or every half an hour
- ceejayoz 4y agoWon’t have been the entire time. Just during critical points. > at various times throughout the surgery
- yellowapple 4y agoBack in high school we did one of those playathon things where a bunch of us band kids basically held a 12-hour jam session as a fundraiser for something or other. About 11 of those 12 hours were cumulatively spent riffing on "Superstition". I was on trombone, and spent most of those hours improvising solos in a desperate yet futile attempt to make it not horrifically repetitive. I still absolutely loathe that song to this day.
- analog31 4y agoJazz bassist here. I'd be worried that the surgeon would go to the bathroom, or get another drink, during my solo.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoI know you’re joking, but I do wonder how the logistics would work if the guy played upright bass or cello.
- api 4y agoSell recordings and title it “with an open mind.”
- teeray 4y agoEveryone will think the album art is just an elaborate illustration.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoI wonder what brain activity data they collected during this. I’ve been wanting to analyze intercranial EEG of people listening to music to understand the degree to which the brain directly resonates to the frequencies and envelopes of music.
- chrismorgan 4y ago> “Moreover, the patient is left-handed. This makes things more complicated […] There’s something bizarrely amusing about this. I’m now picturing a surgeon saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t operate on you because you’re left-handed.” I wonder if discrimination based on handedness is unlawful anywhere. Under Australia’s Fair Work Act (for employment) and Equal Opportunity Act (for public life), you’d have to classify it in as a disability to get it covered, and I don’t know whether that’d be allowed by a judge or jury or whatever (to say nothing of sinister persons refusing to consider it a disability).
- jlg23 4y ago> I wonder if discrimination based on handedness is unlawful anywhere. Most probably. But I think judges would agree that this is a "discrimination" not in the social or political sense but as a rather scientific method to determine whether a procedure is suitable/beneficial/at least not harmful. If not, sign me up to sue all gynecologists because they refuse to treat my (a man) ovaries....
- yellowapple 4y agoI mean, if you do have ovaries, and a gynecologist refused to treat them, then that seems like a bad thing. Probably a relevant concern for FtM trans folks.
- green-eclipse 4y ago> "Moreover, the patient is left-handed. This makes things more complicated because the neural pathways of the brain are much more complicated." This is fascinating. Why would this be?
- pineal 4y agoWithout further information regarding the exact location of the patient’s tumor, it is hard to comment in detail. However, one way handedness affects awake glioma resection is that while right handed people typically have their language dominance localize to the left hemisphere, left handed individuals are more likely to have right sided or even codominant language function. Assuming this was a right sided tumor, the surgeon probably meant that he also had to account for avoiding speech deficits in this left handed patient that he wouldn’t worry about in a right handed one.
- aliljet 4y agoIntegration testing of the brain during surgery? I wonder if the apparatus for this kind of complex testing can be simulated. Seems incredibly powerful....
- thomasahle 4y agoIs this because playing sax is the only function he cared about preserving? Or did he perform other tasks too when they were operating in other parts of the brain?
- dansimau 4y agoFrom TFA: > "To play an instrument means that you can understand music, which is a high cognitive function. It means you can interact with the instrument, you can coordinate both hands, you can exercise memory, you can count — because music is mathematics — you can test vision because the patient has to see the instrument, and you can test the way the patient interacts with the rest of the team," he said. I take that to mean that playing the instrument uses many brain functions and so they're able to monitor many things at once.
- abhorrence 4y agoThe vision but seems plainly wrong to me, many (and I’d posit most) musicians who have been playing their instruments for years can play with their eyes closed. Definitely would test proprioception though!
- soulofmischief 4y agoWell, those musicians likely have highly developed internal visualization skills, but of course I'm not keen on how transferable that is to real vision.
- colomon 4y agoI obviously cannot speak for everyone, but when I play music from memory (and yes, often with my eyes closed) there isn't any visualization at all. It's all a combination of sound and muscle memory. Indeed, for plenty of music I would never have seen sheet music to be visualizing...
- soulofmischief 4y ago
- Llamamoe 4y agoWhat the heck. Why? What if he moved or panicked and disturbed the surgeon?
- peterkelly 4y agoA similar thing was done with a violinist a couple of years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-musician-play-violin-during-brain-surgery-180974246/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-musician-pla... Related research study on the practice: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32505870/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32505870/ If I ever need brain surgery, I guess they'll probably have me try to respond to JIRA tickets and troubleshoot npm dependency conflicts during the operation.
- marstall 4y agolol!
- bombcar 4y agoI’d be afraid that using JIRA would register as complete brain death.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago- Not a problem - Works as designed - It's a feature - This is egregious! I'll get to fix it immediately Doctors: Oh no, we cut too much!
- zasdffaa 4y agoWONTFIX - (skull closed)
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y agoI've always wondered about this. Is there a doctor in the house who could clarify the value of having this kind of lagging indicator? Presumably, the idea of having the musician playing is to give the doctor a heads-up in case they slice into a valuable area of the brain. But, by the time the music playing is affected, the slice would have already happened — so then, what's the point? I agree it's a great way to harvest social media likes (which presumably helps pay the medical bills, so I suppose it's nothing to sneeze at). But it's tough to see how it'd meaningfully help a fine-grained surgery. That abstract on PubMed ^ seems to say much the same: > ...playing music did not improve or modify surgery.
- sebazzz 4y agoI wonder what the nerdy software developer equivalent is of this. I can't play an musical instrument. However, I'm plenty fine with: (1) Fusion 360, (2) .NET Web Development, (3) playing FPS/RPG/simulation/puzzle computer games.
- jcadam 4y agoYou should pick one up. Learning how to read music and play an instrument at the same time is good for the brain.
- sebazzz 4y agoI tried, I really don't have a knack for it.
- iancmceachern 4y agoIt's an interview, you have to pass a software engineer interview
- mikotodomo 4y agoMakes sense, doing an intellectual activity while getting brain surgery probably helps them like when they tell you to move your muscles around when getting normal surgery.
- tomcam 4y agoI am ancient. When I was your age there was a very old joke that went some thing like “Dr., will I be able to play violin after the operation?“ The doctor says: “absolutely.“ And the patient says “great, because I don’t know how play violin at all“. I was sure other old-timers had use this joke before my latest operation, and I was going to overturn it by saying “good because I actually do play violin.“, knowing they were expecting the other punchline. Alas, this joke has completely expired. No one under 30 or so has heard it. I looked like a damn fool.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoThis Simpsons episode isn't 30 years old yet, is it? https://youtu.be/JlmzUEQxOvA https://youtu.be/JlmzUEQxOvA
- sbierwagen 4y agoIt's 26 years old, so it'll be turning 30 soon.
- tomcam 4y agoDoesn’t look a day over 23
- StrictDabbler 4y agoThat joke was famous for about 70-80 years. I know Henny Youngman told it but I doubt it was his. You were telling a joke that was old long before you were born and you grew up in a world where others might know it because we were all watching old shit on television. That television was mostly written by men who were born between the wars. There's a precise birthdate where a child's life would never force them to watch reruns of Gilligan's Island and it is nearly the same as the birthdate for never watching Night Court or The Maltese Falcon. Reruns died sharply and took a bunch of the 20th century monoculture with them. It's very surprising.
- KrishnaShripad 4y agoVideo of the man playing saxophone during his brain surgery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAuAWaLG2_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAuAWaLG2_s
- slmjkdbtl 4y agoI hope there was recordings of what he played
- weitzj 4y agoReally interesting. Back at university I got the chance to attend a surgery since our physics department donored a graphics card for the medical department running a DecAlpha with True64 which had a pixel error. And this machine was used for brain surgery. So better not to have a pixel error. Most of the surgery 8 hours was done with 2 doctors and 2 medical physicists in front of the computer and simulate where to drill a hole in the head and where to pass a needle without touching a vessel. After the coordinates were found the actual surgery 1 hour happened with the patient awake. Also I was very impressed when the neurologist came in and hooked up with a Windows 2000 laptop to the brain pacemaker (against Parkinson’s) and tweaked the stimulation currents. The patient had to count the weekdays aloud and started mumbling around the word “Thursday”. Afterwards the neurologist typed onto his laptop, pressed “enter” and the patient could talk again.