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Dane Brockman has suffered from epilepsy for more than half of his life.
He is now seizure-free after undergoing MRI-guided laser surgery at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital.
“I’ve been feeling really great … previously I’d been having a temporal seizure about every three weeks,” he said.
The minimally invasive approach reaches the brain through a small hole in the head, cut at the width of a pencil.
Then an MRI guides a thin laser fibre to the affected area of the brain, burning off a section of the affected tissue.
Previously, the same result would have meant major brain surgery.
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“What’s truly transformational about this technique is it’s all done without a significant skin incision,” Westmead head of neurosurgery Dr Mark Dexter said.
Some 250,000 Australians suffer from epilepsy, with specialists performing between 40 and 80 surgeries a year.
Experts say the new approach could be used to treat half of those cases.
“If you multiply that across Australia, many hundreds of patients would benefit from this new technique,” Dexter said.
Westmead’s Public Hospital has had a $500,000 laser machine, used to perform the operation, donated by Sydney construction company Deicorp, making the treatment readily available.
