WATCH: Surgeons create personalized brain maps to guide safer surgeries

By DOMINIC SMITH

For neurosurgeons, finding your way around your brain is no easy task, since every brain is slightly different. And in brain surgery, mere millimeters can measure the difference between a successful procedure and mind-altering failure.

That’s why Dr. Alexandra Golby and her team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston are developing inventive ways of mapping each human brain they encounter. Golby, a neurosurgeon, wanted to generate a road map of her patients’ brains in order to help perform as minimally invasive a surgery as possible, and she wanted this information to be tailored specifically to each new patient.