My name is Mirela Simon and I am an epileptologist and clinical neurophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), in Boston, MA, USA. As you may know, MGH is the largest hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, a major tertiary care hospital and one of the most prestigious medical academic institutions in the United States. Among the most successful MGH clinical centers, the Brain Tumor and Epilepsy Surgery Centers offer a unique environment where multidisciplinary collaboration allows comprehensive study of brain tumors and epilepsy with the final goal of delivering high quality care.
My clinical expertise and research interest pertain to neurophysiologic cortical mapping. As the Director of the Intraoperative Neurophysiology Unit within the Neurology department at MGH, I am constantly involved in developing state of the art intraoperative neurophysiologic mapping and monitoring techniques during supratentorial brain surgery. These techniques are essential for ensuring protection of eloquent cortical and subcortical regions during epilepsy surgery and/or resection of brain tumors, and thus prevention of disastrous postoperative neurologic deficits.
Our unit is involved in over 100 functional mapping procedures per year. This tremendous volume of mapping cases, most of which performed in very symptomatic patients, has given me the opportunity to gain considerable experience with different mapping techniques and to develop a reliable mapping methodology as well as to better understand its challenges.
