Hospital Live Tweets Brain Surgery

Want to learn about brain surgery 140-characters at a time? The Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston live tweeted a brain surgery this morning in order to educate students about the procedure.

The brain surgery live twitter feed was live from about 7:30 this morning to 11:30 in the afternoon. You can read the entire feed here.

@houstonhospital wrote:

“The patient has a cavernous angioma in her right temporal lobe… Stand by for first incision. Dr. Kim beginning the incision.”

The hospital also posted photos and videos from the surgery.

KTVQ reports that the surgery was performed by Dr. Dong Kim, the neurosurgeon and Director of the Mischer Neuroscience Institute in Houston who oversaw Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery last year.

Dr. Kim told Mashable:

“What will come out of this is a detailed, real-time sequence of what happens in a brain surgery through all the stages from preparation, to shaving the hair, to making the incision, to draping. People are very anxious and want to know what goes on in a brain surgery like this.”

In addition to having a live twitter feed during the brain surgery, the hospital also had Dr. Scott Shepard, a brain tumor specialist, answering online questions.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time that a surgery has been live tweeted. Natalie Camarata, Memorial Hermann’s digital marketing manager, said that the hospital live tweeted a heart surgery a few weeks ago. That Twitter feed has been viewed about 125 million times.

Camarata said:

“We had a lot of success with the open-heart surgery and saw there was a lot of interest in seeing what goes into something that’s an everyday thing for some people.”

Do you think that Twitter is a valuable tool for the medical community?