SURGEON WORLD LEADER IN BRAIN SCIENCE
Keith Aronyk’s vision helped establish an internationally recognized centre
Maj. Steve Kuervers, the last Canadian soldier to leave Afghanistan, had a splitting headache soon after his flight took off.
“Turns out I had a tumour behind my right eye,” says the battery commander of Edmonton’s 20th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery.
“The tumour grew and had to go. But open brain surgery would have likely ended my carer and kept me bed-bound for two-tofour months.”
Enter Dr. Keith Aronyk, then clinical department head for neurosciences at the University of Alberta Hospital and a visionary responsible for bringing some of the most advanced technology in the world to the hospital.
Instead of conventional brain surgery, one of the most invasive of all surgical procedures requiring much preoperative preparation and even more post-operative care, Kuervers underwent Gamma Knife radiosurgery.
“I arrived at the hospital in the morning for my procedure and was home again in time to take the dog for a walk that night,” says Kuervers.
The Gamma Knife, the most advanced form of non-invasive brain surgery in the world, was introduced in Edmonton December 2017.
It allows surgeons to precisely aim beams of radiation to execute specific brain surgery in a scalpel-less, non-invasive procedure.
“Intense radiation is focused on a patient’s brain from the outside, eradicating cancerous tissue and even reducing benign tumours without negatively affecting the healthier brain cells,” says Aronyk.
Wetaskiwin-born Aronyk is a driving force behind the University Hospital Foundation’s Brain Centre Campaign, which raised $60 million in eight years, $17.2 million of which went to the Gamma Knife and 3T MRI.
Campaign funds also went to the $4.8-million Dan and Bunny Widney Intraoperative MRI Surgical Suite; the $4.8-million stroke ambulance and a $2-million CT scanner.
The surgeon’s vision has played a major role in developing an internationally recognized centre for research and innovation, technology, patient care outcomes and its vision for the future.
Reviews by some of Aronyk’s many thousands of patients include the words: “He saved my child’s life.”
His colleagues regard him so highly they have launched a $1.5-million fund in his name to ensure education, recruitment and research in neurosciences will continue to flourish at both the U of A Hospital and the U of A.
“Keith is one-of-a kind,” says Dr. Vivek Mehta, the U of A Hospital’s neurosurgery divisional director. “You’d have to look long and hard to find another like him.”
A student at Bonnie Doon Composite High School, Aronyk planned honours mathematics as his undergraduate degree. He changed his mind to medical school after his second year at university.
“I wasn’t thinking of specialties in medical school and just wanted to do ‘surgery’,” he says. “But I was so inspired by the late Dr. Peter Allen when I rotated through neurosurgery that I switched from general (thoracic) surgery to neurosurgery in my third year of surgical residency training.”
He later studied at Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, N.Y., and that, he says, set him up for a lifelong interest in Neuro Intensive Care (care of the comatose patient).
“I also had the opportunity to work in Chicago at the Children’s Memorial Hospital and this gave me a career’s worth of pediatric neurosurgery experience in three short years,” says the surgeon. “I returned here with a commitment to dedicated pediatric specialty care and a passion for a children’s hospital.”
Brain surgery is still really in its infancy, says the surgeon.
“We have a long way to go in terms of non-invasiveness and knowledge about brain structure and function,” he says. “We need to understand what makes tumours grow and we need to know how to control them. Also, we need to prevent brain and spinal cord injuries and especially focus on concussion.”
Plans for a Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit and an Epilepsy Monitoring Unit are planned. “The campaign’s centrepiece will be a new 24-bed, state of-the-art Neuro Intensive Care Unit, ” says the surgeon.
“There is still a dream to combine our Brain Centre with a Research and Innovation Centre. It would allow us to lead rather than follow.”
Away from work, Aronyk is often found working in a small, rented warehouse. At his side regularly is his wife Rebecca, mother of their three children. They met some 42 years ago when he was a U of A medical student and she was studying fine arts.
“I keep old and or discarded medical and surgical equipment for use by any surgeon who might be in need,” he says.
“Usually that means a surgeon visiting Edmonton (often from Ukraine) who drops by and picks up whatever he or she can use.
“I have also sent equipment to Ukraine (Kiev’s Kherson and Ivano Frankivsk universities); Jamaica (Montego Bay); Belize; Guyana; Nepal; Africa (Nigeria, Cameroon, Guinea and soon Uganda universities).
“It is often amazing and humbling what they find useful and valuable.”