A team of doctors from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital performed a groundbreaking surgery on a baby still in the womb. The remarkable brain surgery was performed recently for the first time in the United States.
Derek and Kenyatta Coleman are from Louisiana. Theirs was a normal pregnancy until doctors noticed something unusual on their 30-week ultrasound. That was when they had to choose whether or not to treat their baby before she was born.
Baby Denver was growing normally inside her mom, when on a routine ultrasound, doctors discovered she had a vein of Galen malformation, a rare blood vessel abnormality inside the brain. Many babies with this condition develop heart failure or brain damage and often don't survive. In fact, Denver's heart was struggling, and the malformation was getting dangerously large.
So, at 34 weeks of pregnancy, a team at Boston Children's and the Brigham were able to repair her malformation while she was still in the uterus, using ultrasound guidance, a needle similar to those used for amniocentesis, and tiny coils that were placed directly into the abnormal blood vessels to stop blood flow.
The left side of this image shows the large vessel the right side of the image is after the repair.
And below is the brain 26 days after the baby was born.
PS: The procedure was part of an FDA-approved clinical trial.
Derek and Kenyatta Coleman are from Louisiana. Theirs was a normal pregnancy until doctors noticed something unusual on their 30-week ultrasound. That was when they had to choose whether or not to treat their baby before she was born.
Baby Denver was growing normally inside her mom, when on a routine ultrasound, doctors discovered she had a vein of Galen malformation, a rare blood vessel abnormality inside the brain. Many babies with this condition develop heart failure or brain damage and often don't survive. In fact, Denver's heart was struggling, and the malformation was getting dangerously large.
So, at 34 weeks of pregnancy, a team at Boston Children's and the Brigham were able to repair her malformation while she was still in the uterus, using ultrasound guidance, a needle similar to those used for amniocentesis, and tiny coils that were placed directly into the abnormal blood vessels to stop blood flow.
The left side of this image shows the large vessel the right side of the image is after the repair.
And below is the brain 26 days after the baby was born.
PS: The procedure was part of an FDA-approved clinical trial.
