2/7/2017 Ashley A Lawrence
On January 27, Mayo Clinic surgeon Dr. Heidi Nelson discussed emerging technologies, trends, and the future of surgery, as part of Health Innovations Lecture Series sponsored by IHSI and Carle.
Written by Ashley A Lawrence
On January 27, Mayo Clinic surgeon Dr. Heidi Nelson discussed emerging technologies, trends, and the future of surgery, as part of Health Innovations Lecture Series sponsored by IHSI and Carle.
Dr. Nelson spoke to a packed room at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, drawing an audience ranging from undergraduate and graduate student to Carle physicians. Her talk, titled "Emerging Technologies, Trends, and the Future of Surgery," took a historical but also first-hand perspective. Dr. Nelson's research and practice at Mayo Clinic is in the field of colon and rectal cancer. Her research efforts have helped reduce the impact of surgery on patients with early-stage disease through the safe introduction of laparoscopic and minimally invasive surgical approaches. Her work has helped reduce the cancer burden in patients with locally advanced and recurrent rectal cancer through studies examining the role of complex surgeries and intraoperative radiation therapy.
Dr. Nelson has made use of both comprehensive clinical research databases and clinical trials to achieve her research goals. She regards innovations like 3D printing used to model human systems and anatomy, as well as sequencing the human genome as key advances for the future of medicine and surgery.
She quoted NIH Director Francis Collins' perspective on the future of medical research, that "the promise of a revolution in human health remains quite real; ... we invariably overestimate the short-term impacts of new technologies and underestimate their longer-term effects."
The next Health Innovations Lecture is the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Workshop, scheduled for Friday, February 17, 2017. Learn more here, and register today.