Dr. Casey Halpern

The scope of neurosurgery is quite broad.

We take out brain tumors.

We clip aneurysms in the brain.

We take care of patients that have had traumatic brain injury, concussion, spine surgeries, 90% of what neurosurgeons do around the country.

taking care of herniated discs and lumbar fusions.

So the scope is the entire central nervous system, including the peripheral nervous system.

We take care of patients with carpal tunnel syndrome and nerve disorders.

Historically, neurosurgeons did everything in that domain, but now we subspecialize and I'm lucky to be at

Penn Medicine, where we can focus on one of these areas.

So I'm chief of stereotactic functional neurosurgery.

All I do is deep brain stimulation surgery.

And a complement to that is focus ultrasound or transcranial focus ultrasound, which is a non-invasive way to do an ablation in the brain, recently FDA approved.

and it's FDA approved for tremor at the moment.

Deep brain stimulation is a procedure where we have to place a very thin wire that's insulated deep into a part of the brain that's involved in Parkinson's disease, for example.

But that's actually not the therapy.

The therapy is delivering electrical stimulation through the tip of that wire, or one of the tips, as there actually are multiple contacts at the bottom of the wire.

They're very small.

It's a bit more like I have to implant a tool to deliver you a medication, but that medication is going to be in the form of electricity, and it's going to be delivered into a very small region of the brain.

I'm very privileged to be able to interact with the human brain in this way.

It's always in the