 Through my training I became much more interested in functional neurosurgery which is the effort to try to help patients regain function once they become disabled by intractable epilepsy movement disorders or chronic pain syndromes. Two of the important parts of functional neurosurgery has been an evolution of minimally invasive procedures to the point where we could perform many of our procedures without even any scalpels or incisions utilizing computer guided radiation therapies such as Gamma Knife or computer guided ultrasounds in an MRI scanner. These type of minimally invasive surgeries can be as effective as invasive operations. There are other operations that we perform that are much less invasive than before. One of my favorite minimally invasive procedures is the use of deep brain stimulation therapy which uses a small incision in a dime size opening in the skull to use a computer guided probe to pass an electrode to a specific nucleus inside the center of the brain called the thalamus or the globus pallidus or the subthalamic nucleus. These targets are very very helpful in being able to alleviate tremors and movement disorders as you see in patients with Parkinson's disease. This type of treatment can be life changing especially when these symptoms rob patients of the function of their ability to feed themselves or dress in the morning or take care of their activities of daily living. So I'm very pleased to see this and many times the results can be so dramatic that it becomes a poster child for showing patients who are considering having the treatment to be able to interact and talk with patients who have had that treatment. To me I'm excited to continue to see the evolution of our care as we adopt new technologies to enable us to become more capable of alleviating the symptoms as well as the cause of the problems of our patients' neurological illnesses.