An MIT student who filmed his own brain surgery | Hacker News Reader

An MIT student who filmed his own brain surgery

vox.com

32 pointsrmason17 comments

Reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story, "Exhalation", about a being that cracks open and inspects its own functioning brain. http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

If you like audiobooks, EscapePod did a reading of it:

http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/

Thanks for the link! I love Ted Chiang but I hadn't come across that one, it was a terrific read!

Wow this was amazing. Going to have to track down a lot more by this author!

Super story! Thank you.

What a delight.

Met a brain surgeon who said the hardest part of being a new surgeon is listening to your patient deteriorating before you as you perform the surgery. Especially kids.

To continue their careers they need to steel themselves from emotional attachment to the human speaking to them. Seems to be one of the hardest jobs in the medical profession. Happy to see this went so well.

What a captivating, amazing video. I'm really in awe of what surgeons can open up a brain, remove a tumor and put it back together!

I hope to see a day where such things will be done non invasively by biological means instead of brute bloody tools.

It somewhat surprises me this isn't common practice. Isn't it a good idea to do for the institutions themselves? I'd imagine access to videos of surgeries would be excellent resources for the training of new surgeons.

I don't know how common it is, but it is done. For example after reading your comment I googled 'surgery videos' and http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/surgeryvideos.html is the first result. I also know there are surgery recordings on youtube, I had already watched some there before.

Every once in a while we get some big surgery on tv, too.

I'm amazed that they allowed video recording of the surgery. When I tried to photograph the birth of my nephew, the doctors didn't allow it citing lawsuit concerns.

Isn't the thought of someone waving around a touch-phone in the operating theatre rather terrifying? Unless they somehow sterilize them first...

I'm a doctor. Operating rooms have something like 10,000 times the allowed particulate matter compared to a foundry clean room. Additionally in the theatre, there are two surfaces: clean and dirty. Only scrubbed people are clean, and if they touch something dirty they're out. Dirty people can't touch clean things. However the clean people are technically only clean on their arms and between waist and neck. So you will often have (in american theatres j have been in, but never at home in australia) dirty doctors touching clean doctors on the shoulder and having s chat with them. havkng phones in theatre is not going to change the outcome of the procedure or make any material difference to wound healing or infection rates.

That makes sense. I would guess that a regular (not sterilized, bagged or what-not) touch screen device like a phone would be about as dirty as a unwashed hand. I suppose if that is handled as "dirty" there shouldn't be any additional problem.

> MIT

That's it, now I have to read this story.

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