Pediatric Neurosurgery Program

The Pediatric Neurosurgical Program offers all aspects of neurosurgical care in children including: management of hydrocephalus, brain and spinal injury, myelomeningocele, occult spinal dysraphism, refractory epilepsy surgery, spasticity, craniofacial disorders, and pediatric brain tumour. While pediatric neurosurgery operates within the section of Pediatric Surgery at Alberta Children’s Hospital, all members’ primary affiliation is with the Department of Clinical Neurosciences,

Highlights

Congratulations goes out to Dr. Jay Riva-Cambrin, present program director for the neurosurgery residency program, who was promoted to the rank of  Full Professor.

Thanks to the generous contributions of the. Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation and Calgary Health Foundation (1.23 Million dollars), the MR-guided  Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy (MRg-LITT)  program of the  Epilepsy Surgery Program  treated its first pediatric patient with intractable epilepsy in March, 2020.

The procedure performed in the Western Canada’s first Epilepsy Surgery Suite, Seamen MR suite, combines  IMRIS Intraoperative 3T MR technology developed by Dr. Garnette Sutherland, with ROSA robotic assistant for stereotactic laser implantation and a Visualase Laser console.   

The successful minimally invasive laser ablation, in a patient with a rare epileptic disorder caused by a hypothalamic hamartoma (HH), provided instant relief of seizures from a pathology and location very difficult to treat with conventional open surgical approaches.  In addition to HH, patients with focal seizure disorders secondary to MTS, focal cortical dysplasia and developmental tumors stand to benefit from this new minimally invasive technology.

Research

The Pediatric Neurosurgery section continues to be an active participant in the Hydrocephalus Clinical Research Network and the Canadian Pediatric Neurosurgery research study group, with Dr. Riva-Cambrin co-ordinating the efforts for both.  Dr. Riva-Cambrin was lead author on a seminal HCRN collaborative paper that helped to delineate the population of infants most likely to benefit from ETV+CPC (endoscopic third ventriculostomy+choroid plexus cauterization), a procedure that has forever changed North American practice for the treatment of infantile hydrocephalus.

Dr. Nick Sader, senior neurosurgical resident, with Dr. Riva-Cambrin and Dr. Hader, recently published a local collaborative effort with Dr. Valerie Kirk, Pediatric Respirologist, on the Relationship Between Chiari 1.5 Malformations and Sleep-Related Breathing Disorder on Polysomnography.  Both were published in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.

Members

Neurosurgeons: Dr. Walter Hader, Dr. Clare Gallagher, Dr. Jay Riva-Cambrin

Nurse Practitioner: Kelly Bullivant

Nurse Clinician: Kelly Hogue