Current Projects
My joint position at BC Children's Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital provides me with a unique opportunity to interact with a number of colleagues in numerous areas of clinical and academic medicine. At BCCH, my primary focus is imaged-guided therapy. Although this sounds somewhat vague, it actually is appropriate in that new and novel opportunities to enhance the care of children are often driven by innovation and collaboration. Through my involvement in all facets of interventional radiology, many seemingly obvious treatment strategies used in the adult population provide the reference for adaptation into the pediatric setting. As a member of the Society of Pediatric Interventional Radiology and the SIR Pediatric Interventional Radiology Standards Subcommittee, we routinely audit pediatric IR practices, and create documents for "best practice" guidelines.

Within the UBC and BCCH setting, I am currently involved in a retrospective review of all the percutaneous pediatric liver biopsies performed in the past 10 years, with the goal being to determine low- and high-risk populations, as well as the need for hospital admission and/or blood transfusion. I am also involved with a Department of Anesthesia project at BCCH comparing pulse oximetry techniques to thermodilution methods in determination of cardiac output in various pediatric disease states.

As a member of the Vascular Anomalies Clinic at BCCH, I am very active in the workup and management of children with vascular malformations/anomalies. Together with Dr. Douglas Courtemanche (Head, Vascular Anomalies Clinic), we have been working towards formalizing our patient assessments and followup, thereby allowing improved prospective analysis of treatment outcomes, as well as natural history. Several publications and presentations have come from our work.

My strong relationship with Pediatric General Surgery and the pediatric neuroscience community have resulted in numerous collaborations that focus on innovation and adaptation of techniques into the pediatric setting. Currently, Dr. Erik Skarsgard and I are completing a submission on the use of embolic microcoils as a method of aiding the localization of subpleural pulmonary nodules for resection by a VATS procedure.