Clinics and Care Centers
A cancer diagnosis is frightening. At the Alvord Brain Tumor Center, we're here to help at every step of the way.
We offer a multidisciplinary "Medical Home" to brain tumor patients, giving them one place to go for consults, on-treatment visits and follow-up care. Our care team of physicians and nurse practitioners presents you with a full range of treatment options – and the pros and cons of each – during a single visit. Our staff social worker will support you and your loved ones throughout the course of your care. And we'll manage every aspect of that care right here, from testing to diagnosis to treatment. Whenever you have questions, you'll know where to turn.
The Cerebrovascular Lab at Harborview offers a full spectrum of tests for the assessment of cerebrovascular disease and injury. The results of these tests give your physician or neurosurgeon important information about the blood vessels that supply your brain.
Gamma Knife radiosurgery revolutionized the treatment of human brain diseases when it was introduced more than four decades ago. The UW Medicine Gamma Knife Center at Harborview offers the latest in Gamma Knife technology: the Perfexion and the Perfexion Extend system.
This minimally invasive radiosurgery technology treats patients with abnormalities that are located within the brain. It is a one-day, outpatient procedure that requires little or no anesthesia, offers a fast recovery time and is safer and less costly than surgery or whole-brain radiation.
Over 500,000 Gamma Knife procedures have been performed worldwide since the technology first became available in 1968. It is used to treat blood vessel problems, such as arteriovenous malformations or AVMs, brain tumors, including acoustic neuromas, meningiomas, pituitary tumors, cancers that originate in the brain, and cancerous lesions that have metastasized from distant areas of the body. It may be used to treat lesions that are close to critical structures. A small percentage of patients are treated to relieve functional disorders such as unmanageable pain, tremor and epilepsy.
UW Medicine physicians at the Neurological Surgery Clinic at Harborview specialize in the comprehensive assessment and management of neurological conditions including acute vascular anomalies, brain tumors, aneurysms, movement disorders and diseases of the spine.
The clinic is staffed by attending physicians who evaluate newly referred patients for advanced diagnostic studies and elective procedures. In addition to performing elective procedures, attending physicians, in association with neurosurgery residents, evaluate post-surgical and post-trauma patients during a weekly clinic each Wednesday.
The Neurological Surgery Clinic at UWMC has been an international leader and pioneer in the care and treatment of patients with diseases and disorders of the brain, spine and peripheral nerves.
Our comprehensive and multi-disciplinary approach to complex neurosurgical problems such as tumors, degenerative disease, vascular lesions, epilepsy, spinal anomalies, peripheral nerve disorders, chronic pain and spasticity, movement disorders, and developmental defects ensures patients uncompromised care and the most advanced facilities.
In addition, our well-established National Institutes of Health and privately funded research programs allow us to bring leading-edge advances from the laboratory to the clinic and operating room.