Vycor Medical Inc (VYCO)

[$tock Princess '17]

Great article:

Vycor Medical Inc., the company that makes the ViewSite Brain Access System Sundaresan used, hadn't envisioned it for this use. Some 60 hospitals nationwide have the product.

"We were somewhat surprised," said Vycor's president, Ken Coviello. "We tried to design a product for deep brain access, to reach deep targets, small tumors, hematomas.

"Bullets were never on the radar. This is the first bullet to be removed."

Coviello said the breakthrough use has wartime implications, for use at frontline hospitals to stabilize patients.

Barrios said he's glad the procedure may help soldiers on distant battlefields, as well as city shooting victims. "That's great, really great," he said.

"Unfortunately, we have many gunshot victims," said Sundaresan, who made headlines two years ago when he saved Vada Vasquez, a teenage girl hit in the head by a stray bullet.

On April 8, police responded to a Tinton Ave. building in the Bronx and found Barrios and his friend, Giovanni Rivera, both shot in the head.

Rivera died at Lincoln and Barrios was rushed into surgery.

"One bullet went from one side to the other and left fragments deep in the brain," Sundaresan said.

"I wanted to remove them because they would cause seizures and they cause tremendous problems; MRIs can't be done. The problem always has been that you have to go through normal tissue and hunt for pellets, causing trauma to the brain."

Lincoln had recently acquired the Vycor product and Sundaresan used it on Barrios. The technology looks like a speculum, a tube.

"You look through it with endoscope, it's married to a computer that guides the passage so you can see into the depths, it shows us which direction to take," the surgeon said.

One fragment in the right side was close to the sinus and another was in the left side where the visual cortex resides. He removed them both.

"We would not have attempted this without this technology," Sundaresan said. "It's very exciting."