"In addition to a baby’s age, the success of the Kasai procedure is determined by the expertise of the surgeon and a standardized postoperative medication management. Matias Bruzoni, MD, a pediatric surgeon at Packard Children’s, performed the delicate reconnection on Bucky. He’s performed about 35 Kasai procedures in his 11 years at Packard Children’s, making him one of the most experienced surgeons performing this specialized procedure."

Dr. Stephanie Chao has been accepted to the 2020-2021 Office of Faculty Development and Diversity’s (OFDD) Junior Leadership Bootcamp Series.

"I have found that there are multiple leadership styles that I have come to appreciate over the years. Some styles I admire in leaders may work for certain types of leaders with personality traits that are unique to them. A workshop like this can help me develop my own personal style as a leader," said Chao. "I want to be a leader that builds others up along with her, to build teams that people want to join rather than have to. Hopefully, this workshop will help!"

Dr. Tom Krummel is the recipient of the 2020 William E. Ladd Medal, the highest award given by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The Ladd Medal recognizes pediatric surgeons who have made significant contributions to our field and to the care of infants and children.

According to the release, Dr. Krummel was awarded unanimously. "Dr. Krummel's career has been notable for his pioneering innovation. His studies of the cellular and biochemical mechanisms of scarless fetal wound healing, followed by his work on the application of information technology to simulation-based surgical training and surgical robotics, were cited as landmark contributions to surgical science. Over the last two decades, Dr. Krummel has worked tirelessly with computer scientists, engineers and industry to apply information technology in the development of surgical trainers to enhance surgical education."

Dr. Krummel was Surgeon-in-Chief at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital from 2002 to 2016. He has served as Program Director for the General Surgery Residency Program and Chair of the Department of Surgery. He is currently Co-Director of the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign.

Stephanie Chao, MD, is the trauma medical director for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and an assistant professor of surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Among other things, her research focuses on preventing childhood injury, which is the leading cause of death among children.

She states "I do think the risks are increased. Parents are juggling more than they ever have had to before. Normally children are out of the home 7 to 10 hours a day in a supervised environment. Now these children are home. Some parents may need to work from home, but at the same time they also need to watch their children. They are trying to balance both, but it is difficult to do both well."

Dr. Chao is also working with anesthesiologists on use of virtual reality and other tools to minimize anxiety and discomfort among children undergoing surgery. She advises parents on how to keep their children safe at home now that families are sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic.

By day, they are on the front lines of patient care—performing surgery, delivering babies, and providing care for some of the sickest patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. But outside of the hospital, they are Midnight Rounds—the unofficial cover band of Stanford Children’s Health, featured in this month’s issue of Punch Magazine.

More than a decade ago, pediatric surgeon Matias Bruzoni, MD, and Raji Koppolu, NP, came together to perform acoustic versions of popular songs at a division holiday party, with Dr. Bruzoni on piano and guitar, and both on vocals. Soon after, they were joined by Yasser El-Sayed, MD, chief of maternal-fetal medicine and obstetrics, on drums; pediatric surgeon James Wall, MD, on bass and guitar; and neonatologist Jon Palma, MD, on violin, along with career musician David Scheibner. From there, the band Midnight Rounds was born.

The band comes together weekly to practice their growing repertoire of more than 50 songs—mostly innovative covers and mashups of rock classics, with a mix of country and bluegrass. The band was dubbed “Midnight Rounds” by Dr. El-Sayed as a nod to the doctors’ profession and their often late-night rehearsals, which take place after the day’s medical rounds are complete and can run as late as midnight. During the COVID-19 shelter in place, the band has continued to play music together, remotely.

The UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium held its annual pitch competition via videoconference on March 30, awarding a total of $225,000 in seed funding to several companies working to develop health technology and medical devices for children.

“Our mission is to enable and accelerate health technology for children,” said James Wall, MD, co-principal investigator of the consortium, in his opening remarks at the start of the competition. Wall is a pediatric surgeon at Stanford Children’s Health. “Despite the trying times, we still feel it’s incredibly important to serve the underserved needs of pediatric health care through technology development,” Wall said. The UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium was established in 2018 with a five-year, $6.7 million grant from the FDA to Wall and his colleagues Michael Harrison, MD, Shuvo Roy, PhD, and Hanmin Lee, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco.

The competition’s top prize, the Platinum Award of $50,000, went to Eclipse Regenesis, Inc. The Eclipse XL1 device was developed by a team that included James Dunn, MD, surgeon in chief at Stanford Children’s Health, and Tom Krummel, MD, professor emeritus of pediatric surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

In April 2010, Mason was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford at just 7 weeks old. He was born with a life-threatening, rare liver disease called biliary atresia, meaning Mason’s liver was trapping bile instead of flushing it out to his gallbladder. Mason’s family was terrified that they were going to lose him.

Dorsey Bass, MD, and Matias Bruzoni, MD, FACS, discovered baby Mason‘s liver was failing, and he needed a specialized surgical procedure—known as a Kasai procedure—to route the bile out of his liver and into his small intestines. It was Mason’s best chance for survival.

10 Years Later - Mason continues to receive care at Packard Children’s. He takes medication and has regular appointments to check that his liver is functioning normally. His ability to live a healthier, happy life is because of the life-saving care Drs. Bass and Bruzoni and their teams provided.

Dr. Stephanie Chao is a pediatric general surgeon, an assistant professor of surgery and the trauma medical director for Stanford Children's Health. In addition to performing surgeries on children of all ages, she has a range of research interests, including how to reduce gun-related deaths in children and the hospital cost associated with pediatric firearm injuries.

"The operating room is the place where I have the privilege of helping children feel better. It's a very calming place, like a temple. When I walk through the operating room doors, the rest of the world becomes quiet. Even if it is a high-intensity case when the patient is very sick, I know there is a team of nurses, scrub techs and anesthesiologists used to working together in a well-orchestrated fashion. So even when the unexpected arises, we can focus on the patient with full confidence that we'll find a solution." 

"The result sometimes feels like chaos, but I don't want to wish my life away waiting for my kids to get older and for life to get easier. Trying to live in the moment, and embracing it, is how I find balance."

As we move into a new decade, we checked in with formerly conjoined twin sisters Eva and Erika Sandoval, who in 2016 were surgically separated  at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. The Sandoval girls are the seventh pair of conjoined twins Dr. Gary Hartman has separated and the fifth separation surgery he has done at Stanford. The last separation at Packard Children’s was performed in 2011. For a recent story on Stanford Medicine’s blog, Scope , writer Erin Digitale spoke with Aida Sandoval, the twin’s mother, who mused about delightfully typical 5-year-old stuff: They are learning their numbers and love playing with kinetic sand, finger puppets and Barbie cars. Always talkative, the girls have also started bringing big words home from school. After a lesson about bees, they came home chattering about bee anatomy, popping out vocabulary like “abdomen” and “thorax. I’m in awe at the conversations they have with me sometimes,” Aida said.

Now in kindergarten, the sisters have mastered using a combination of their walkers and prosthetic legs to get around. The long-term goal is to transition them to using their prostheses with walking sticks for balance and support.

Earlier this year, Stanford's Division of Pediatric Surgery performed its first-ever fetal surgery. The surgery to repair the fetal myelomeningocele (also sometimes referred to as spina bifida or neural tube defect) was performed through a hysterotomy. 

"[Spina bifida] is one of the most common congenital anomalies, or birth defects and is associated with significant potential morbidity including most commonly leg paralysis, bowel or bladder incontinence, and hydrocephalus" said Dr. Karl Sylvester, one of the lead surgeons on the team. "Fetal surgery has shown promise in decreasing the degree of hydrocephalus, and possibly decreasing the severity of paralysis, leg weakness, and incontinence." 

Sylvester was joined by lead co-surgeons Dr. Yair Blumenfeld from OB-GYN (Maternal-Fetal Medicine) and Drs. Kelly Mahaney and Gerry Grant both from Pediatric Neurosurgery. Also on the team were Pediatric Surgery Fellow Dr. Enrico Danzer as well as Anesthesiologists Drs. Brendan Carvalho and Calvin Kwan and Pediatric Cardiologist Dr. Shiraz Maskatia. 

Technology in healthcare as in other user sectors has always been a R&D enabler helping researchers to work faster and collaborate better. Healthtech academics share their outlook on the collusion of new technologies and healthcare at Constellar Ventures annual conference.

Highlighted by Dr. James Wall, Stanford Pediatric General Surgeon and director of Stanford's BioDesign Fellowship, "the current cost model creates cascading problems that are ripe for disruption. Healthcare is expensive. The US healthcare system has the distinction of spending twice as much per patient as other developed nations with no better outcomes to show."

He continues to state that "individually, practitioners have very limited scope of practice compared to the expotential growth in medical knowledge. At the end of the day, the fee for service system doesn't incentivize delivering best outcomes. Patients pay a copay and then extra for lab work, a prescription, or a procedure regardless of the treatment's effectiveness. The convergence of data, connectivity, and computing power can provide more efficient personalized healthcare. But it has to be coupled with value, to deliver better outcomes, at less cost." 

Dr. Stephanie Chao, Pediatric General Surgeon, and a multidisciplinary team of specialists are working on less invasive ways to conduct diagnostic imaging for their chest wall patients during their initial evaluation and better options for pain control after surgery.

"We are likely the only children's hospital in the nation routinely using 3-D scanning for patients with chest wall malformations. We wanted to better assess our patients, so we came up with the idea and conducted a study right here in the Chest Wall Program...Patients with chest wall malformations often deal with pain, social isolation, or physical limitation for a long time. The goal of our Chest Wall Program at Packard Children's is to improve each step of the process, from diagnosis to healing, and help patients move past their malformation with as little impact to their lives as possible." Dr. Chao says. 

STANFORD (KRON) — Pediatric surgeon Stephanie Chao is among the Stanford doctors and medical students who announced Monday that they are taking a stand against what they say is a firearms epidemic in America today.

“Because the ones who are often hurt are not the bad guys but rather family members and children,” Chao said. “So if people want to keep a gun in the home, they should learn how to keep it safely.”

The doctors and students are supporting specific legislation and other measures designed to promote responsible gun ownership and restrictions on assault rifles and other weapons of war.

“It means modeling responsible behavior around guns, it means better government infrastructure so we can keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves,” Chao said. “And it means keeping weapons of mass destruction like assault rifles out of our communities.”

"New studies, including one published last year, by the Stanford University School of Medicine, and another published this month, in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, reinforce what ought to be the unremarkable point that states with stronger fun laws see fewer children dying of gunshots. 'If you put more regulations on firearms, it does make a different,' Stephanie Chao, an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford, said. 'It does end up saving children's lives.' (It is no surprise that surgeons, who see children devastated by bullets, are often the originators of these studies.)"

"With pediatric markets, that margin for error is almost zero," James Wall, co-investigator and biodesign lead at the UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium said. It is one of five FDA-backed partnerships bringing together health systems and academic or research institutions to support medical devices for children through all stages of development, an idea born from the 2007 legislation.

"If you're going after heart disease or diabetes or even asthma, you can afford to spend a little bit of money and maybe even lose your way a little bit, pivot back, and you still have a big enough market that there's opportunity for technology to be developed on a reasonable amount of capital," Wall told MedTech Dive.

In 2018, as part of a congressionally-mandated effort to stimulate the development of pediatric devices, the FDA awarded a $6.7M grant to James Wall, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine and Michael Harrison, MD, of University of California, San Francisco to establish the UCSF-Stanford PDC. 

Each finalist had the chance to win up to $50,000 in seed funding, prototyping support, and customized advising. The judges recognized the startups that showcased breakthroughs that could help accelerate the next generation of pediatric medical devices.

Dr. Jordan Taylor, a research fellow in the Division of Pediatric Surgery, has received three awards this past month: one from the Pacific Association of Pediatric Surgeons (PAPS) and two from the International Pediatric Endosurgical Group (IPEG).

“We believe it will be possible to extend the principle of newborn screening for genetic disease to many more newborns and children at risk for acquired diseases using the center’s expertise in expanded metabolic profiling,” said Karl Sylvester, MD, associate dean for maternal and child health and co-director of the new center.

“This definitely wasn’t a case you see every day,” said Shew. “But it’s exactly what we are trained for. When every second and every decision can impact the outcome, we have an extraordinary team of experts here who work simultaneously to triage the most critical areas of care.”

"Dr. Mueller adds that the study may help parents have a different view of what’s possible in education and may change how parents utilize what’s available to them. For the researchers, she says it will be useful to see how growth mindset can be passed from parent to child. “We always ask ourselves: Where do these mindsets come from? The obvious answer is: Oh, they come from parents,” Dr. Mueller says. “But that link between parents and kids—it isn’t as clear as you might think physiologically and hasn’t actually been well substantiated in the literature.”

"A child is 82 times more likely to die in our country of a firearm injury than in any other developed nation," said senior author Stephanie Chao, MD, assistant professor of surgery at Stanford. "We focus a lot on the federal government and the things they can do to protect our children from firearms. But our study shows that what states do at the state level really does have an impact."

“Research on pregnant women and children is informing our understanding of adult diseases,” says David K. Stevenson, co-director of the Child Health Research Institute at Stanford University. “If we can make interventions early in life before people are burdened by chronic disease and the diseases of aging, we could have a profound impact on public health and set the stage for much greater savings later on.”

"The Stanford team is led by James Wall, MD, a pediatric surgeon at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and assistant director for the Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, a training program that teaches aspiring innovators to solve health care problems with technology. Wall said he was excited by the collaboration as an opportunity to join the efforts of two great children’s hospitals."

"Recently, ... Stephanie Chao needed to remove fluid from the cyst of a young boy. The size of the needle required in that procedure typically terrifies children. But in this case, the boy never saw the needle. His attention was absorbed inside his VR headset. “His only question was if I had finished,” said Dr. Chao."

A dedicated group of Stanford students and faculty members, including Dr James Wall, are working together to decrease umbilical cord catheter infections.

Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., a healthcare research and information company, has named Dr. Gary Hartman and Dr. Karl Sylvester among the top doctors that practice in the Bay Area. 

"This case is a pectus excavatum repair that is done with the placement of a nuss bar thoracoscopically. Two incisions on both sides of the chest are made and a bar is placed with thoracoscopic guidance. The correction is immediate. This patient is a 16-year-old boy with a haller index of 3.5. His sternum and costal cartilages are deformed in an inward fashion, pushing the heart and lungs away. Most of these patients are asymptomatic. He complains of a shortness of breath with exercise. There is also a cosmetic indication for this operation. These patients usually feel much more comfortable once the sternum is flat."

“The architects understood that wellness is important to the healing process,” said Dr. James Dunn, Chief of Pediatric General Surgery. “It’s going to be a bright and cheerful place for employees to work and patients to heal.”

"The patient is a 52-year old male, who is 90 kilos. He has an acute flaring of inflammatory bowel disease. Unfortunately, the patient's diagnosis is still indeterminate. However, the patient has severe bleeding and abdominal pain and despite medical treatment the patient is not improving. This procedure will be conducted with five ports and the specimen will be removed through the ileostomy side."

“Most kids, just seeing the needle, would start crying,” says Chao, an assistant professor of surgery. But her patient, engrossed in a 3-D animated underwater world of dolphins, shipwrecks and schools of fish, didn’t even flinch when she poked him — twice: “He was so immersed in the virtual reality, he had absolutely no anxiety.”

"This Single Site Hepatic Cyst Unroofing was performed on a 2-month old girl who was found, prenatally, to have an abdominal cyst. Postnatally, she was asymptomatic and eating fine. A follow up ultrasound during the postnatal period showed that this cyst was likely to be one of the following: A) a mesenteric cyst (involved in the mesentery of the intestine, B) an enteric duplication cyst (partial duplication of the intestines), or C) a liver cyst (based on location of the cyst in the right-upper quadrant). During laparoscopic exploration, it was found to be a simple liver cyst. Given the large size and its location off the edge of the liver (not involving the biliary tract), Dr. Wall elected to unroof the cyst to remove the risk of complications in the future."

“The gold standard in surgical education is to observe a procedure in-person, a video gives you one angle which is usually on the focal point of the surgery, but VR brings you closer to that immersive feeling,” said Dr. James Wall, an assistant professor of pediatric surgery and assistant fellowship director at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign at Stanford University. 

Dr. Matias Bruzoni, Program Director for the Adolescent Weight Loss Surgery Program at Stanford Children's, is helping adolescent patients on their journey to better health.

6-year-old Miles had his foot run over by a car and required 10 subsequent surgeries. His frequent, painful bandage changes were challenging and required multiple medications for pain and anxiety until he started playing Spaceburgers. Now, he does them with only the help of VR.

“Short bowel syndrome is a devastating disease with few viable treatments that meaningfully restore quality of life for children affected with this disease,” said Department of Surgery Chair Dr. Mary Hawn. “A device solution, such as the one developed by Dr. Dunn will expand the capacity of the native gut. This is truly innovative, will drastically improve the outcomes and—quite simply—will save lives.”

Stephanie Chao, MD, Pediatric General Surgeon and Pediatric Trauma Medical Director at Stanford Children’s Health, recalls her first time using VR with a patient. “I needed to aspirate a cyst (remove fluid using a needle) on the neck of a 9-year-old patient using a very large needle. When most children see such a large needle, there is a lot of anxiety, fear, and even crying. Often, this prevents me from being able to perform the procedure without anesthesia.  In this case, I numbed the neck just with ice for five minutes and had my patient wear the VR goggles to play Spaceburgers. He was wearing the VR goggles as I got set up, so he never even saw the needle. I told him when I was going to poke him, but because he was immersed in VR, he had absolutely no anxiety. I was able to pass the needle twice, and he did not even flinch (except to move his head slightly to play with the VR). His only question was if I had finished. Overall, it went very smoothly. We were able to accomplish a minor, but important procedure in the clinic without excess medication or an additional trip to the hospital.”

“Having them separate, it’s like the day-to-day for anybody with twins,” Aida said. “It’s a wonderful feeling, just to be able to make sure two more little babies get to adulthood.”

The girls are home and medically stable after a risk 18-hour separation surgery last December. As they grow into toddlers, they’re choosing different toys, developing distinct hobbies and expressing their own opinions on everything from dresses to Disney characters.

"At Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, we want to make sure we are always there to care for our community's most critically injured children," said Stephanie Chao, MD, pediatric trauma medical director at Stanford Children's Health and assistant professor of pediatric surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "Our collaboration with Stanford Health Care's emergency department enables us to meet the needs of these patients and their families at the moment they need it most. With the re-verification of our Level 1 trauma center, we are honored that the hospital's efforts providing quality round-the-clock care have been recognized."

"Dr. Dunn told Medical News Today that to him, the biggest barrier to getting tissue-engineered intestine to patients is "to get all of the cell types working together in a coordinated fashion, followed by scaling the tissue-engineered intestine to [a] clinically useful dimension."

"Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford’s Adolescent Bariatric Surgery program is the first and only adolescent bariatric surgery program on the West Coast to receive accreditation by the American College of Surgeons Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program."

"For the seventh time in his career, Dr. Gary Hartman successfully led a multidisciplinary surgeon team to separate conjoined twins. In the 17 hour surgery, the 50 person medical team separated the girls that were connected from the chest down. It involved splitting the girls' one liver, bladder, large intestine, and pericardinal sac."

Michael Caplan, University Of Chicago

Karl Sylvester, Stanford University

Biomarkers and Barriers: Opportunities and Challenges in NEC 

"The Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC) Society received a PCORI Engagement Award to host the first national Symposium on NEC, taking place at UC Davis April 5-7, 2017. The NEC Symposium will feature a robust agenda with internationally renowned clinicians, investigators and patient-family advocates, who will facilitate discussions on advancing the study, prevention and treatment of this devastating neonatal disease. For details, please visit www.NECsociety.org "

“We are very excited for Dr. Dunn to join Lucile Packard Children's Hospital as our Surgeon-in-Chief and Chief of Surgery” said Christopher G. Dawes, president and CEO of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford Children’s Health. “We have incredible expertise in pediatric surgery, and Dr. Dunn’s broad surgical experience, specialized intestinal practice and bioengineering expertise will add to the ongoing development of our world-class surgical programs.”

“Children’s hospitals in the U.S. that have transplant programs don’t do a huge number of transplant operations,” Lund said, “and that’s why I think it’s incredibly time and labor and research intensive for children’s hospitals to invest in these programs and build these programs.”

"Karl Sylvester discusses metabolism in prematurity, biology and disease in babies born too soon at the 2016 Childx Symposium. Childx is a dynamic, TED-style conference designed to inspire innovation that improves pediatric and maternal health. Visit the website at http://childx.stanford.edu/."

"Mark Juravic, James Wall and Paul Yock discuss innovations such as BioDesign and LifeBubble to improve perinatal care at the 2016 Childx Symposium. Childx is a dynamic, TED-style conference designed to inspire innovation that improves pediatric and maternal health. Visit the Childx website at http://childx.stanford.edu/ "

"We'll try to understand the fundamental building blocks—the systems biology for what it means to be free of overt disease, what we call "healthy." Then we'll follow people to try to capture the early signs of that transition, with the goal of trying to prevent disease as we go forward."

"We're looking at patients' medical histories and family histories, looking at their symptoms and phenotypic data, and also data that can be derived from wearables," Lund says.

BERT (Bedside Entertainment and Relaxation Theater) rolled out in the hospital’s perioperative unit. Its purpose is to reduce the use of oral anxiety medications before operations and improving patient and family satisfaction levels.

“I think it’s important to realize that in the world of medicine, although the ratio of males to females is changing, some of these old stereotypes still have an impact on the practitioners,” said co-senior author Claudia Mueller, MD, PhD.

"Dr. Matias Bruzoni, Director of the Hispanic Clinic at Stanford Children's, describes the importance of patients and their families receiving medical care in their native language."

James Wall (Stanford/ Biodesign) on "Biodesign: training the next generation of medical technology innovators"

"This mass was impinging on both the heart and the lung and preventing them from functioning normally. And without its removal, it would've been fatal," Dr. Karl Sylvester said.

"We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their process. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their hard work did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed."

"Dr Wall had good news. Not only could he help Deion swallow again, the 16-year-old would be one of the first pediatric patients in the United States to undergo a highly skilled surgery for esophageal achalasia that would require no incisions and result in very little pain, complications or recovery time. Known as POEM – per-oral endoscopic myotomy — the procedure is conducted entirely through a patient’s mouth. Instead of performing laparoscopic surgery, which involves making a handful of small incisions through a patient’s chest or abdomen, Wall works with flexible tools through the mouth to access and divide the tight muscular fibers of the lower esophagus, allowing for the passage of food and liquids."

"Sanjeev Dutta, MD, FACS discusses the fascinating new world of surgical technology. The pediatric general surgeon shares how medicine and technology have combined to achieve less invasive procedures and healthier outcomes for surgical patients."

"Hear from Stanford Asian Liver Center doctors and patients about Hepatitis B. Learn about transmission possibilities, treatment options, misconceptions about Hep B and pregnancy, testing, and more."

"Dr. Karl Sylvester, Executive Director of the Fetal and Pregnancy Health Program at Stanford, performed a rare surgery to help an unborn baby survive. By draining a cyst before he was born, Dr. Sylvester helped the child's lungs grow and develop before being delivered."

"An interview with Karl G. Sylvester, MD conducted at the Hot Topics Meeting (www.hottopics.org) in December 2012 on his study regarding Neonatal Biomarkers: Nexus of Clinical Care and Research."

"Claudia Mueller, Ph.D, M.D. discusses providing surgery and caring for children at California Pacific Medical Center"

The rewards of his chosen specialty literally last a lifetime, Hartman says. “If an adult surgeon does something fantastic with a 50- or 60-year-old, the patient may live another twenty or 30 years. If we get things right with a baby, that child will get 70 or 80 years of use out of what we’ve done.”

"On November 1, 2011, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford surgically separated two-year-old conjoined twins Angelica and Angelina Sabuco. The twins are seen here playing at home, five months after the successful operation. Video from April 16, 2012."

"Each year, nearly three quarters of a million people die from liver cancer. Liver cancer is one of the most fatal cancers, with a five-year survival rate under 15%. However, the majority of cases of liver cancer are preventable. Long-term (chronic) infection with the hepatitis B virus is the leading cause of liver cancer. Nearly 1 in 10 Asians has chronic hepatitis B infection, but most are unaware of their infection because they have no symptoms, placing them at high risk for liver cancer. Learn about how to screen for hepatitis B and how to prevent it. Help put an end to liver cancer. Speaker: Stephanie Chao, MD, The Asian Liver Center"

"Neurosurgeon, Dr. Gary Steinberg,  and Pediatric General Surgeons, Dr. Sanjeev Dutta and Dr. Matias Bruzoni, join forces to save a young patient's life."

"Mom, Ginady Sabuco, introduces the Sabuco family and reads a statement of thanks to the staff at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, the media, and God for the successful separation of formerly conjoined twins Angelina and Angelica. Find out more at www.conjoinedtwins.lpch.org "

"At Packard and Stanford, we're looking for ways to give back to the global community," Butler said. "We want to raise the quality of medical care worldwide, particularly for children, and we feel a responsibility to train the larger community of pediatric surgeons with our skills."

"On March 17, 2009, Cisco held an HBV screening on-campus at the LifeConnections Health Center (www.ciscolifeconnections.com). In this video, Cisco's Glenn Osaka and Stanford Asian Liver Center's Dr. Stephanie Chao speak about the importance of HBV screening for the Asian community."

"If we start accepting that we are looking at two different diseases, further research may be able to elucidate some differences in the disease process and help us tailor management," said senior study author Sanjeev Dutta, MD, assistant professor of surgery and pediatrics at Packard Children's and the School of Medicine. Right now, because physicians have such a poor understanding of what causes the disease, they can't tell which infants will be hardest hit, Dutta said. "At present, we're managing all cases the same way without addressing the concept that the child with heart disease may have a different underlying cause of NEC than the child with prematurity alone. We're giving support, but not really curing the disease."

"Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford has one of the most successful bariatric surgery programs in the U.S. In this video, we see surgeons John Morton, MD, MPH, FACS, and Craig Albanese, MD, performing weight loss surgery on a 400-lb teen. Morton is director of quality, surgery and surgical sub-specialties and director of bariatric surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an associate professor of surgery. Albanese is chief of pediatric general surgery at Packard Children's and the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn endowed director for pediatric surgical services. He is a pioneer in minimal access surgical techniques and a professor of surgery at the school of medicine."

"A multidisciplinary team led by Dr. Gary Hartman and Dr. Frank Hanley successfully separated the first set of conjoined twins with congenital heart disease in a nine hour surgery. 

"This is as complex as surgery gets," said Dr. Gary Hartman, who will be lead surgeon during the separation procedure. "It's a lot of work, a lot of headaches to plan this. I'm not trying to boast, but we think we're one of the few institutions that can do this. We really feel like we should do it."

"Currently, pediatric laparoscopic surgery is limited by an inability to perform small anastomoses. Not so robotic surgery. Last year, Krummel teamed up with Craig Albanese, M.D., a pediatric surgeon at Stanford, to perform the first robot-assisted Kasai portoenterostomy, anastomosing a hepatic-surface bile duct to a loop of small bowel, in a six-week-old infant born with biliary atresia."

"Craig T. Albanese, MD, a pioneer in minimal access surgery for infants, children, and fetuses, has joined Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital as the director of pediatric surgery. Minimal access surgery – a technique in which specialized surgical instruments are inserted through incisions small enough to be covered by a Band-Aid – results in less pain, quicker recovery, shorter hospital stays and improved self-image due to smaller scars."