06-19-2024 Primetime - Flipbook - Page 10
10 A Special Advertising Section of Baltimore Sun Media Group | Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Advancements at
University of Maryland
help treatment of many
common brain disorders
By Gregory J. Alexander, Contributing Writer
Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore
use MRI-guided focused ultrasound to treat movement disorders like
Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor.
F
or over 100 years, the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has
spearheaded groundbreaking innovation in the fields of neurology and
neurosurgery, impacting the lives of thousands of Marylanders.
“The University of Maryland Medical
System cares for a broad spectrum and
large number of patients with neurological disorders and acute injuries,” says
Graeme F. Woodworth, MD, FACS, professor of neurosurgery at the University of
Maryland School of Medicine and chair of
neurosurgery at the University of Maryland
Medical Center in Baltimore. “We created
the University of Maryland Neuroscience
Network, which has been an important
innovation as it allows our system to serve
the needs of the state without every hospital
having to purchase expensive equipment
and hire neurosurgeons. Instead, we can
leverage technology and collaboration and
strategically deploy resources within the
network of hospitals.”
When discussing where UMMC, which
celebrated its 200th anniversary last year,
has recently seen breakthrough advancements, Woodworth, along with his colleague, Peter Crino, MD, Ph.D., professor
of neurology at the University of Maryland
School of Medicine and chair of neurology at the University of Maryland Medical
Center, point to four areas:
Stroke
“Cerebral vascular disease, or stroke, is
one of the biggest public health challenges
in the U.S. and around the world,” Crino
says. “Stroke is one of the leading causes
of death across the world. It’s a very common neurological problem that has huge
disability associated with it, working hours
loss and public health costs not only for the
patient but also for the workforce and for
caregivers.”
Crino adds that in the past decade,
physicians have been able to pivot to a proactive and time-based, aggressive therapy
approach. “We have the ability to use thrombolytic drugs to dissolve the existing clot
that is affecting the blood vessels causing
the stroke in the brain,” he says. “An important interface between neurology, neurosurgery and interventional neuroradiology is the
ability to do a large vessel occlusion extraction by imaging a person who has a large
clot, and then using a catheter to remove
the clot to greatly diminish or prevent any
neurological injury.”
Crino notes that in 2021-22, the
University of Maryland Medical System
cared for over 3,000 stroke patients.
Epilepsy
Woodworth and Crino agree that epilepsy is another common public health challenge, as 1% of the world’s population has
been diagnosed with the seizure disorder.
“At UMMC, there is tremendous synergy
between neurologists and neurosurgeons
who are epilepsy specialists,” says Crino.
“For about one-third of epilepsy patients,
there is no combination of medications that
will work for them, so one option is to identify the spot in the brain where the seizures
are coming from and remove that part of the
brain. There is also a new technology that
utilizes a minimally invasive, image-guided
laser to ablate the part of the brain that is
responsible for the seizures.
“In addition, neuromodulation is an exciting new approach where we map where the
seizures are coming from and implant an
electrode in that part of the brain, which is
attached to a mini-computer that uses an
artificial intelligence algorithm to learn what
the patient’s seizure onset looks like and
deliver an electrical stimulus to abort the
seizure.”
Parkinson’s disease
UMMC has been a leader in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease for decades. In
the 1950s, University of Maryland neurosurgeon Dr. William H. Mosberg Jr. began the
development of focused ultrasound ablation
of the brain for movement disorders like
Parkinson’s and essential tremor.
Woodworth notes that two challenges
that Mosberg and others encountered were
the inability to get the ultrasound through
the intact skull without removing part of the
bone and monitoring the effects in real time.
As a result, neurosurgeons shifted to use
photon-based radiation to develop stereotactic radiosurgery (e.g., gamma knife) that
uses radiation and computer-guided planning with high-resolution imaging to treat
abnormalities in the brain.
“With advanced new tools at UMMC,
we’ve been able to surmount those barriers
from the 1950s with focused ultrasound,”
Woodworth says. “Now, MRI-guided
focused ultrasound can be used in the treatment of essential tremor and Parkinson’s
disease, and UMMC has been involved in
the advancement of this technology for over
70 years.”
Brain cancer
Crino says that with the advent of
uniquely trained neurologists and oncologists specializing in brain cancers, there has
been a huge impact for patients with these
often life-altering tumors.
“Technology now allows us to create
a personalized map of the patient’s key
functional networks within the brain and
use that to guide surgical decision-making
to remove the tumors in the brain while
also developing therapies for the residual
invasive disease,” Woodworth says. “It’s a
game changer.”
