Neurosurgery

Neurosurgery

Clinical research at the University Hospital Antwerp/University Antwerp has greatly increased over recent years, with establishment of international collaborations with, amongst others, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of California San Francisco, the University of Cambridge and Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  The research of the neurosurgical department has a strong clinical focus. Major research lines include Traumatic Brain Injury, Neurocritical care, Operative techniques and Neuromodulation.

CENTER-TBI

CENTER-TBI is a large European project that aims to improve the care for patients with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

It forms part of the larger global initiative InTBIR: International Initiative for Traumatic Brain Injury Research with projects currently ongoing in Europe, the US and Canada.

CENTER-TBI brings the newest technologies and many of the world's leading TBI experts together in a much needed effort to tackle the silent epidemic of TBI. International and multidisciplinary collaboration are key elements to the project in which past dogmas will be left behind and innovative approaches undertaken. As Coordinators of CENTER-TBI we are proud to lead this generationally unique project.

We anticipate that CENTER-TBI will revolutionize our view of leading TBI to more effective and efficient therapy, improved health care at both individual and population based levels, and better outcomes at lower costs. (www.center-tbi.eu).

IMPACT project

The IMPACT project (International Mission on Prognosis And Clinical Trial design and analysis), coordinated by the neurosurgical department of UZA, has been successfully completed in 2012.  The aim of this multidisciplinary and international study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, was to improve the methodology of clinical trials in traumatic brain injury. This study has yielded over 55 publications in peer reviewed international journals, and besides achieving its goals of improved recommendations for trial design, has set standards for prognostic modelling and for standardisation of data collection worldwide. (www.tbi-impact.org).

Individualized targeted management in neurocritical care project

In 2009 the department of neurosurgery received funds from the IWT (Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology) for a 4-year project: “Individualized targeted management in neurocritical care”. In collaboration with the departments of Intensive Care and Radiology, multimodality monitoring has been implemented in patients requiring neurocritical care with the aim to better understand what is going on in the brain of an individual patient at a specific moment in order to provide more personalized treatment. The main focus of this project is on patients with traumatic brain injury or subarachnoid hemorrhage. The preliminary results of this ongoing project on advanced neuromonitoring are highly encouraging.