CARS Preview 2018

It’s amazing, it’s stunning, because you can actually see the brain at work. To provide that sort of knowledge - and maybe even more, because in neuroscience there is more to come - to the surgical work is one of the biggest adventures in neurosurgery. I think what most of our patients don’t know in the beginning is exactly that understanding of how different parts of the brain work or contribute to a certain function, like language for example. Brain surgery for language- eloquent tumors is one of our main focus areas and that’s really exciting. Could you improve my English accent maybe? That’s not what surgery is about. For us, there’s no use to interfere with healthy people or with people with language problems, so what we do is try to help people with brain tumors who already might have language issues before surgery. We try to help them get better afterwards - or at least not worse. What would you like to tell our readers in advance of CARS? CARS is a very good place to bring people together who should talk way more than they did in the past. It is one of the few great institutions to provide a platform for exchange, bringing clinicians and non-clinicians together to exchange ideas at all different stages. Clinicians usually come up with demands and offer a clinical reality check for engineers, while engineers sometimes present very early ideas for where the journey could go. I think the exciting thing we can do together at CARS is find that balance between ingenious ideas and actual clinical demand. I am really looking forward to many discussions this year! Anna Roethe 7 CARS 2018 Preview Modern high-tech ORs are multiprofessional environments: close collaborations between surgeons, staff, anesthesiologists, imagers and engineers are vital for routine workflows. Image: IGL/Charité 2017