Patna: On 21^st September an awake Craniotomy surgery was done by a team of doctors led by Dr. Saquib Azad Siddiqui, a neurosurgeon in AIIMS Patna. It was the first awake Craniotomy surgery in Bihar.

Awake Craniotomy is a surgery performed in the same manner as a normal surgery, except that the patient is awake through the entire process.

During the surgery the patient, Rohit from Muzaffarpur was asked to keep moving his right hand and right leg and was asked to communicate with the doctors during the four hours procedure; giving them real time feedback.

As per the local newspaper Dr. Siddiqui said “We opt to do awake brain surgery in cases in which we know that if surgery is performed in that portion it can affect movement of the body. In this case, the patient’s tumour was located in the left part of the brain which controls language and the right hand and right leg movements. This is why when we were removing the tumour from his brain during the surgery, we ensured that patient’s right hand and leg movements were on so that we could get real-time feedback that we were not damaging any part of the brain.”

This type of surgery lowers the risk of damage to the functional areas of brain that can affect vision, movement or speech.”

To perform this type of surgery a trained anaesthetist and an experienced neurosurgeon is required for such surgeries.

In Rohit’s surgery, Dr Ajeet Kumar, who was earlier working with AIIMS Delhi and has assisted in such kind of surgeries there and Dr Poonam Kumari, were the anasthetists, added  Dr. Siddiqui.

Three months ago Rohit was diagnosed with brain tumour. The tumour was 4cm in length due to this he   was suffering from headache and seizures very often. Now the patient is doing well and will be discharged after two days.

  AIIMS, Bihar, health, Patna