How does neurosurgery work? How does the surgeon identify which parts of the brain are okay to cut and which one’s arent’t? Isn’t everyone’s brain structured differently?

Question

With other surgeries I guess it’s possible for the surgeon to identify the different tissues, nerves, and blood vessels through an X-ray or CT scan and plan the surgery accordingly

But with the brain, doesn’t everything look like a big blob of brain tissue? How can the surgeon tell what part of the brain performs what function and what’s safe to cut so that he can access the tumor? How would he avoid a Phineas Gage type outcome?

In: 33

Answer 1

Doctors will take pictures of the person’s brain with a big machine that’s made of magnets while they do things that are important to them. That’s known as a Functional MRI. That allows the doctors to build up a map of how all of their brain cells work together and they can do this before the surgery even starts.

For some people they even wake them up during surgery and have them do something like solve math problems while they operate to make sure those parts of the brain still work. There was even a lady who [played the violin during her surgery](https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807414527/musician-plays-her-violin-during-brain-surgery)!