The Future of Brain Surgery
What will brain surgery look like in the next decade?
On this episode of The Vitals, host Leslie Schlachter sits down with three leading experts in neurosurgery and neurotechnology: Dr. Joshua Bederson, Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, and Dr. Shahram Majidi. Together, they explore the rapidly evolving landscape of brain surgery, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology, and discuss how these innovations may transform care for patients with paralysis, stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and other neurological conditions.
From robotic assistance in the operating room to the possibility of decoding and interacting with the brain's own "neural code," this wide-ranging discussion offers a fascinating look at where neuroscience, engineering, and medicine are headed next.
Ben Rapoport: If you think back to that moment, the first human genome was sequenced, right? That was like a pivotal moment in, in genomics. And what happened after that, nobody, almost nobody would've predicted, right? Right. Nobody really, really knew what was gonna happen when we could sequence many human genomes and sequence them quickly.
Well, the neural code is another biological code. It's a different code. It's dynamic, it's two-dimensional or three-dimensional, but it's another biological code that we're now able to compute on.
Leslie Schlachter: Hello, and welcome back to The Vitals, the Mount Sinai Health System's groundbreaking roundtable video podcast. I'm your host, Leslie Schlacter, a neurosurgery physician associate here at the Mount Sinai Hospital. On this episode, we're discussing something near and dear to my heart and my brain, and that's the state and future of brain surgery.
Every day, I see and speak with patients in need of some form of neurosurgical intervention, and [00:01:00] since I've started in this role, I've witnessed personally the incredible advancements made in this field. So what is the current state of neurosurgery, and what are the biggest advancements on the horizon, particularly related to artificial intelligence and BCI, which is brain-computer interface?
And we're really lucky to be here at the Mount Sinai Health System, where we are one of the world's leaders in brain-computer interface. So to walk us through these answers and to these questions, we're joined by three giants in the neurosurgery field, Chairman Dr. Joshua Bederson, Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, and Dr.
Shahram Majidi. Thank you so much for being here. Okay, so let's start with the big picture. What do you think the future of brain surgery is gonna be 10 or 20 years from now?