Dr. Mika Niemelä, Head of Helsinki University Hospital Neurosurgery Department He discusses expanding international work in brain and spine neurosurgical treatments. You run one of the largest and most active neurosurgery departments in the entire Western Europe. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Could you please discuss your department of neurosurgery? Please discuss your neurosurgical treatments for cerebrovascular diseases and brain tumors. Dr. Mika Niemela, MD. Helsinki neurosurgery was established in 1932. It's very active, we have 25 doctors here. 18 neurosurgeons, 7 residents. We treat surgically or endovascularly all together 3,500 patients per year. We have many visitors. We have had over the last 20 years about 3,000 visitors from all over the world. They saw what we were doing. we are very happy to collaborate. Dr. Mika Niemela, MD. We have international connections both to neurosurgeons, researchers, and patients from all over the world. we enjoy our visitors and our international collaboration a lot. Your neurosurgery patients come not only from Finland but literally from all over Europe and Asia, for example. Yes, my patients have come between Toronto and Addis Abeba. Patients come from everywhere. Your work also focuses both on cerebrovascular diseases and brain tumor treatment. Yes, both. We have been known for a long time for our cerebrovascular research and also for our clinical work in neurosurgery. Dr. Mika Niemela, MD. We also treat patients endovascularly with the most modern techniques. also we have had a lot of active research on brain tumors. We treat both malignant and benign brain tumors. We treat brain tumor patients at our department very actively. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. You treat both adult and pediatric patients with brain tumors. We have a dedicated team for each patient group, both adults and children. That includes the pediatric patients. We treat different kinds of tumors. We treat intrinsic brain tumors in eloquent areas. We do awake surgeries. These complicated operations are done by some neurosurgeons. We perform skull base benign tumors. We also operate on posterior fossa tumors. Dr. Mika Niemela, MD. We have divided these tumors into dedicated teams. There are always between 2 to 5 neurosurgeons who can handle all the cases. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Also you have a dedicated team for the spine microneurosurgery. Absolutely, one-third of our patients have spine problems. So we also do minimally invasive spine surgery. We perform very short incisions. We also we do endoscopic lumbar spine disc surgery. The incision is only one centimeter long. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Your neurosurgery department is also very well known for its educational efforts internationally. Exactly! You run in your department a very interesting neurosurgery course every year. Dr. Mika Niemela, MD. Yes, this year we run our course for the 18th time, in the first week of June. We dedicate this course to teaching neurosurgeons from all over the world. We have famous neurosurgeons coming here to operate cases along with us. It is considered to be a very unique and the best live microneurosurgery course in the world. Because it's not only us but also international neurosurgeons operate on difficult cases. There are between 60 to 90 participants taking a look at what we are doing in this neurosurgery course in Helsinki.