The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Knowledge integration will aid progress of science: ISRO chief

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Saturday, Sep 15, 2007
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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Knowledge integration will aid progress of science: ISRO chief

Staff Reporter

Photo: S. Gopakumar

SETTING THE TONE: Governor R.L. Bhatia inaugurating the seventh annual conference of the Indian Society of Cerebrovascular Surgery in the city on Friday. —

Thiruvananthapuram: The convergence of technologies and knowledge integration in various fields will help all branches of science, especially medicine, to achieve progress, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said on Friday.

The country should be able to develop a core multi-disciplinary team to take R&D activities forward, he added.

Dr. Nair was delivering the keynote address at the seventh annual conference of the Indian Society of Cerebrovascular Surgery, being hosted by the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), here.

Biomedical engineering had been emerging in a big way in the country. Several recent developments in quantum physics and space telemetry had transformed the medical engineering field and helped in developing biomedical devices, especially imaging machines. Space medicine had contributed much to the development of modern medical technology, Dr. Nair said.

SCTIMST director K. Mohandas, who presided over the function, said while technological advances had brought in new treatment modalities, the cost of health care was sky-rocketing. Doctors should think about how the benefits of medical innovations could be delivered to the people at lower costs, he said.

The conference was inaugurated by Governor R.L. Bhatia. Three eminent neurosurgeons, T. Kanno, K.V. Mathai and M. Sambasivan, were honoured on the occasion. The three-day workshop will focus on brain bypass surgery, a rare but life-saving procedure which is adopted to treat brain aneurysm (a disease when the main artery to the brain dilates, causing it to rupture and bleed). In this procedure, a vein from the neck or a radial artery on the hand is harvested and connected to the brain, by-passing the diseased portion.

Another surgical procedure for treating aneurysms involves connecting an artery of the face and scalp (superficial temporal artery) to an artery of the brain. This procedure, called anastamosis, is adopted in a rare neuro disease (Moyamoya disease), which affects children.

Two world-renowned neurosurgeons, L. Sekhar and Yoshio Suzuki, will perform these surgeries, along with the SCTIMST team, as part of the workshop. Five patients at SCTIMST will benefit from these procedures.

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