One million pounds raised for Birmingham Children's Hospital
It will go towards a new iMRI scanner
A million pounds has been raised for Birmingham Children's Hospital Charity, which will go towards new state-of-the-art technology.
A new iMRI scanner will be made available ,with the money, which will make brain surgery safer and more efficient.
It's something which would have benefited 13-year old Freya Haynes from Wolverhampton, who had to have an operation to remover her brain tumour.
When Freya was 10 years old, her dance teacher noticed Freya’s right arm was shaking and she was struggling to get it into the correct position.
When Freya’s handwriting in school also began to suffer, her parents took her to her GP. There began investigations at her local hospital, which led doctors to discover Freya had a brain tumour and a cyst.
The cyst, which was attached to the tumour, was putting pressure on the part of the brain and nervous system which controls the right side of her body. This explained the weakness in her right arm, and other symptoms that had developed, including a change in the way she walked and a noticeable difference to the right side of her face.
Freya was transferred to Birmingham Children’s Hospital for an operation to remove the tumour.
As is the current practice, following her surgery, Freya was taken two floors below to have a scan of her brain and assess if all the tumour had been removed. Unfortunately, a small piece of tumour, deep in her brain, remained.
Because the scalp wound had already been closed, and the nature of the tumour was still uncertain, the surgeons decided to wake Freya up and not re-open the wound for an immediate ‘re-look’ surgery.
Thankfully, this turned out to be a benign tumour, but if the hospital had had leading-edge intraoperative MRI (iMRI) technology, they could have immediately revisited the area in theatre and checked if it was removable.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital is home to one of the largest paediatric neurosurgical centres in the UK, but it is the only one without an iMRI scanner. The £1.5m iMRI Appeal will bring this state-of-the-art technology to patients, like Freya, for the first time.
With iMRI technology, an MRI scanner, housed next door to the theatre, is moved directly to a patient on an operating table, or a patient to the scanner, to ensure surgeons can obtain ‘live’ and up-to-date information about the location and size of the tumour.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity has just hit the £1m milestone in its fundraising appeal, which has enabled work to start on the new clinical building at the hospital, which will house the new theatre and iMRI scanner.