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:
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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