Dr. Ayub Ommaya holds the actual Ommaya Reservoir (port) on the left. On the right, we can see how the port sits on the outside of the skull, but provides a way to administer medicine deep inside the brain.
Dr. Ayub Khan Ommaya was a Pakistani American neurosurgeon and highly influential medical inventor. In 1963, he invented a device to sit semi-permanently on top of the skull. It was a port that sat on the top of a patient’s skull, just like ports had been connected to parts of the body for years. allowing doctors to continually treat and examine them: “An Ommaya reservoir (port) is a plastic, dome-shaped device inserted underneath the skin on your scalp. The dome is connected to a catheter placed in the ventricle of your brain where the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) circulates.” https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/ommaya-reservoir-and-its-role-in-cancer-care.h00-159694389.html
But Dr. Ommaya asked that question that great inventors ask: Why? Why drill all those holes? Why not just drill one central hole and put a port over it? And so he created the Ommaya reservoir, which is just another name for a port.
Weirdly, nobody had ever thought to to use a port on the brain! So every time a doctor needed to treat a brain tumor or take a sample of tissue from within the skull, the surgeon drilled another hole in the patient’s skull. If the patient was sick for a long time, they might end up with A LOT of partly healed holes in their skulls. After awhile a person might feel like a they have a colander or sieve for a skull - with all those partly healed holes possibly allowing for infection.
Having a lot of holes, even small holes, would make a person more likely to get a skull fracture as well.
Dr. Ommaya made drilling one hole all that was necessary - even if a patient needed long term treatment. Just. One. Hole….Amazing.
But wait! There’s more! “He was an interesting character in that he was also an opera singer and used to sing for his patients after finishing surgeries, earning him the nickname of the “singing neurosurgeon.” In his younger years, he won the National Swimming Championship in Pakistan and was also in the rowing team at Balliol College in Oxford.” https://didiask.blog/a-moment-of-shame-for-a-pakistani-doctor/
Dr. Ommaya was also a Rhodes Scholar and later worked in Washington, DC: “Not only did he invent the Ommaya Reservoir, but he was also an expert in the field of traumatic brain injuries and his work had special importance in the establishment of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC.) https://didiask.blog/a-moment-of-shame-for-a-pakistani-doctor/
