Calgary neurosurgeon Dr. Garnette Sutherland has won this year’s prestigious $25,000 Manning Award of Distinction, which honours Canadian innovators.
Sutherland developed a movable MRI system that can produce high-quality images during an operation, a story reported in last week’s Business Edge.
The system shows surgeons if their surgery is successful – if they have completely removed a patient’s brain tumour, for example – and eliminates the need for re-do operations.
Sutherland first used his Intraoperative MR System in 1996 to successfully remove a dog’s brain tumour.
He and his colleagues have since used the technology, at the Seaman Family MR Research Centre in Calgary, to monitor surgery on more than 550 human patients.
This summer, the first-ever sales of the $2.5-million US commercial version of the system were to two hospitals in the U.S. by Winnipeg-based Innovative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Systems Inc.
Winning the award from the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation brings recognition, says Sutherland, former chief of neurosurgery at the University of Calgary-Foothills Medical Centre.
“It’s good for this project, and it’s very good for people marketing the project and moving it forward.”
