INNOVATION IS FUN: FETAL SURGERY TO MAGNETS

摘要

Like many in the room, I just love tackling unsolved surgical problems that we find in our patients. So I'll tell two little stories. One of them is about fetal intervention, and the other about the use of magnets. So how did the fetus become a patient? Well, when I was starting almost 40 years ago, we had no idea this was even in the offing because nobody had ever seen a living human fetus. Powerful new imaging technologies, mostly ultrasound, were just being developed. Our obstetric colleagues were just developing prenatal diagnosis and starting to discover before birth the same problems that we saw after birth. Once we could see the fetal problems developing, we could ask ourselves: should we try to reach inside the uterus and do something to save that fetus? But we had no idea how. We had no tools, no equipment. We didn't really know anything.