Dr. Garnette Sutherland - Recipient

NeuroArm. The name alone conjures images of robots and brains and science fiction. And that’s apt, given the University of Calgary project effectively allows a neurosurgeon to sit at a console and guide a robotic arm through the complex minutiae of brain surgery while the patient is in the bore of an MRI machine. Cool! We know that’s not a technical term and that ASTech is an organisation that recognises technical achievement. But really. A robot doing brain surgery? Awesome! The project is the subject of articles appearing in vastly different publications, including IEEE Journal (published by the renowned Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and Neurosurgery (presented by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons). What this means is the U of C team that developed this technological marvel is not just brilliant; it’s remarkably diverse, requiring a vast range of skills and expertise.

The neuroArm project is the brainchild of Dr. Garnette Sutherland, born in Edmonton, raised in Calgary, France, and Nova Scotia, and educated in Winnipeg at the University of Manitoba. Though he was always better in science than anything else in high school, it wasn’t until he was doing his undergraduate studies that Garnette was truly bitten by the science/medicine bug. He was working with a very futuristic research chemist, Ernie Bock, who showed him a picture of the very first MRI—it was the image of a finger taken by the English research team led by eventual Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Mansfield. He began to realise that researchers such as Mansfield and his fellow Nobel Prize Recipient, American Paul Lauterbur, invent things whose use is then determined by specific fields. He felt that if he obtained a medical degree, he could apply research to improve medicine. And so a career was launched.

During his third year of medicine at the U of M, Dr. Sutherland took the opportunity to spend some time at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he met Theodore Rasmussen, a great neurosurgeon who demonstrated that because of its direct, hands-on contact with disease, neurosurgery was an attractive field. He was further pointed in this direction upon returning to Winnipeg where he worked with the exceptional Dwight Parkinson. Upon completing his degree, Garnette moved to London to take up his residency at the University of Western Ontario. It was there he came under the influence of legendary Charles Drake, at the time arguably the world’s finest neurosurgeon. It was he who taught Dr. Sutherland the one major lesson that has guided much of his career. “Never mind your successes. You have to examine your failures, and by understanding them, develop strategies for not repeating your mistakes.” He explains further. “At the end of the day, Dr. Drake would ignore his myriad successes. He’d take his residents to the x-ray viewing area and look at the instances where he’d been unable to completely obliterate the aneurysm or excise the whole tumour. I took that approach with me when I returned to Manitoba to join the Department of Surgery and Pharmacology.”

That refusal to accept failure led him eventually to start coordinating his surgeries with intraoperative MRIs so that he would be able to look at the images of missed tissue before closing the wound and thereby improving patient outcomes. He has never forgotten one particular case—a young girl who required two surgeries, rather than one, to remove multiple tumours. While the child survived, she suffered additional trauma of the kind neuroArm can minimise. The robotic arm can work inside the bore of an MRI machine, allowing a physician to watch the procedure in real time on a screen while manipulating the arm as it handles specially-designed surgical tools. The robot has to be able to perform like a neurosurgeon and must be able to work in very confined spaces. But the surgeon can be surer of getting the job done the first time because s/he is being fed a real-time image of the environment.