Team-based care
Pediatric neurosurgeons work together to help children with complex neurologic conditions.
Families who seek care for a child with a complex neurologic condition find the experts they need with Mayo Clinic Pediatric Neurosurgery and the Children's Center located at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. These specialists provide innovative, compassionate and whole-person care that is focused on the child and family.
The pediatric neurosurgery team are experts in caring for children who have complex and serious conditions of the nervous system for which surgery is the best treatment option. This team has access to the most advanced technologies and methods. These include a type of surgery using small cuts (minimally invasive surgery with endoscopy), fetal surgery, MRI during surgery (intraoperative MRI) and a type of laser that uses heat to kill tumors (laser interstitial thermal therapy). Some children may be helped by an approach that doesn't use surgery. If that's true for your child, your healthcare team talks with you about why and what other treatment options you have.
Team-based care for the whole child
Your child benefits from Mayo Clinic's team approach to care. Your neurosurgeon consults with doctors in other fields of medicine to provide exactly the care your child needs. The care team might include pediatric experts in anesthesiology, fetal and maternal medicine, neurology, hematology/oncology, urology, surgery, plastic surgery, otolaryngology, ophthalmology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, orthopedic surgery, or clinical genomics. Your care team works with you to develop a care plan based on your child's needs. This is what makes care at Mayo Clinic different: coordinated care and genuine collaboration.
Your child's team also may include nurse practitioners, physical and occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, patient educators, and child-life specialists.
Our pediatric neurosurgery team works closely with other pediatric specialists to provide whole-person care in an efficient and effective way. They are organized to help children with complex and serious neurologic conditions through multidisciplinary clinics and specialty groups. These include:
Getting the best care when your child has a brain tumor
David J. Daniels, M.D., Ph.D.: It's hard as a parent to hear the news that your child has a brain tumor. What I tell my families is that we're going to take good care of your child. That is our number one goal.
Jonathan D. Schwartz, D.O., M.P.H.: One of my favorite parts of taking care of children is coming into a room of worry, and here's what we're going to do to get your child better.
Dr. Daniels: Parents should take their children to Mayo Clinic for the simple reason that we have some of the best outcomes in the world. We have experts at every part of the brain. There's no tumor really that we can't tackle. We routinely get patients referred to us for tumors that are being told are inoperable. We can assemble some of the world experts in a very expedited fashion to be able to offer surgery that other places can't offer.
Dr. Schwartz: A lot of our second opinions, over a quarter, have a different pathologic diagnosis when they come to Mayo. So getting the diagnosis right in the first place allows us to make sure we're doing the right thing. We've learned at Mayo Clinic that it's not always the right decision to rush children into surgery. There are a subset of tumors that we are able to treat with therapies that don't even require an incision.
Proton beam radiation is one of the most significant advances that we have because we're allowed to minimize the side effects and injury to healthy tissue. You're able to spare hitting the heart, the lungs, essential organs that don't need radiation because there's no disease there. There's a lot of new transformative changes to improve the quality of life, to minimize the side effects, medicines that are now allowing children to be treated successfully without losing their hair, without feeling sick. And that could include fertility preservation so that children can have a family of their own when they're older. A lot of us are all parents, and I think we all take this very personal and say, if this was our child, this is what we would do and why we would do it.
Dr. Daniels: The best part about my job is seeing patients do well. Having a parent give me a hug five years from now and say, you cured my child. That's it.
How parents find hope when a child faces brain surgery
We asked a Mayo Clinic expert: How do parents find hope when their child needs brain surgery?
Edward Ahn, M.D., Pediatric Neurosurgery: What parents have to know when their child goes through neurosurgery is that they have to be prepared to be surprised. This is one of the treats of doing what we do in dealing with people at this age: The brain is constantly developing, so if one part of the brain loses function, then oftentimes you'll see another part of the brain make up for that.
Try to learn from your child's outlook.
Dr. Ahn: The children are the ones who sometimes are the most hopeful of the whole family just because they're innocent … their outlook on things. They're not the ones to think, "Why me? Why is it that this happened to me, and woe is me." Instead, they just deal with it.
Remember there's so much growth ahead.
Dr. Ahn: My favorite part about working with the kids is watching them grow up. At the time of crisis, we do our intervention and that's what we are prepared and trained to do. But then when we see the child go on to life and we see them develop, we see them grow to be the child that they were meant to be. That's exciting to me.
Dr. Ahn has helped thousands of families with children diagnosed with brain tumors and other malformations.
Latest treatments and technology
Mayo Clinic has long been a destination for parents seeking answers for their children's complex and serious conditions of the nervous system. The clinic's leading-edge technology and treatments for children with complex conditions include:
- Surgical mapping. Using advanced MRI imaging, the surgical team maps the brain to find the key nerve networks. This helps them avoid them, which makes surgery much safer. This method is called tractography.
- MRI during surgery. With this procedure, your surgical team uses real-time MRI of the brain during surgery for brain tumors, epilepsy and movement disorders. This method is called intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging, also called iMRI. It allows your surgeon to remove the exact right amount of tumor or epilepsy circuits in a real-time setting.
- Surgery with small scalp cuts to help infants. Some babies are born with a fibrous joint between the bones of the skull closed too soon. This condition is craniosynostosis. The fused joint needs to be separated to allow the skull to expand as the brain grows. Our surgeons are experts in using tiny cuts to make the repair, an approach called endoscopic surgery or minimally invasive surgery. It has proved to reduce scarring, blood loss and length of hospital stay.
- Heat to destroy diseased cells. With a technique laser interstitial thermal therapy, also called LITT, your surgeon is able to treat epilepsy and some brain tumors by making burns through pen-tip size holes in the scalp and skull rather than by performing an open brain surgery.
- Fetal surgery for spina bifida. Pregnant mothers with the diagnosis of fetal myelomeningocele can undergo prenatal surgery to repair the defect. This has been shown to reduce the rate of shunt insertion for hydrocephalus and help with the baby's leg function.
- 3D anatomic modeling laboratories. Pediatric radiologists create 3D models of complex anatomy from CT scans and MRI scans in order to help surgeons plan their approach.
Innovative research focused on children with neurologic conditions
Our pediatric neurosurgical team has developed innovative treatment options and includes national and international leaders in pediatric surgery. Learn more about neurosurgery research at Mayo Clinic.
Our physician-scientists also have large basic and translational research to better understand and treat malignant brain tumors in children, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Talk with your doctor about whether a clinical trial might be right for your child. In addition, Mayo Clinic is a member of the Children's Oncology Group. This large collaboration among hospitals gives children access to clinical trials that offer the latest in treatments for childhood cancers.
Top-ranked center
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is ranked among the Best Hospitals for neurology and neurosurgery and for heart and heart surgery by U.S. News & World Report. Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Rochester is ranked the No. 1 hospital in Minnesota, and the five-state region of Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, according to U.S. News & World Report's 2024-2025 "Best Children's Hospitals" rankings.
Level 1 Surgery Center. Mayo Clinic Children's Center is a Level 1 Children's Surgery Center, the highest verification awarded by the American College of Surgeons (ACS).
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Feb. 06, 2025