Jeffrey Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld joined the Army Reserve in 1984 and his ongoing interest in Third World medicine started with a six-month posting to Papua New Guinea.[7][8]

He continued to make regular tours to disadvantaged countries and his unit was sent to war-ravaged Rwanda in 1995 as part of a UN mission; he was a general surgeon with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. "We had stabbings, we had gunshot wounds," he said. "We had children who'd been macheted in the head in order to murder them and had miraculously survived those injuries."[7] In Rwanda, he also had to deal with landmine injuries and this drove him to champion the cause to ban them, working with the International Landmines Council.[7][3]

By 2011 he was a brigadier, still returning to Papua New Guinea each year to train local medical staff in advanced surgical techniques.[9][10] He became the surgeon general of Defence Force Reserves. He served on eight deployments, including to Rwanda, East Timor, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Iraq, and by 2018 he had risen to the rank of major general in the Australian Defence Force.[11][12][13]

As of November 2021, he is Senior Neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at The Alfred Hospital,[2] and the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University.[6]

In addition to his role as the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Monash University,[6] Rosenfeld is also Adjunct Professor in Surgery, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, USA,[14] Adjunct Professor (Research), Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Adjunct Honorary Professor in Surgery, Chinese University of Hong Kong,[2] Founding Director, Monash Institute of Medical Engineering (MIME), Honorary Professor of Surgery, University of Papua New Guinea, and Honorary Consultant Neurosurgeon, Longgang Central Hospital, Shenzhen, Peoples Republic of China.[6]

Rosenfeld's research has focussed on the areas of neurosurgery, traumatic brain injury, bionic vision, and medical engineering.

He pioneered the surgical technique to remove hypothalamic hamartomas from the brain. This type of tumour causes gelastic epilepsy, and they are located in a very inaccessible area inside the brain. The conventional surgical approach was to access the brain from below, because the tumour is closer to the bottom; Rosenfeld's novel approach was to access it from above, using a microscope to navigate down between the brain's hemispheres.[15] In 1997, he performed the first such operation on 4-year-old Tom Leray-Meyer. Before the surgery, Leray-Meyer had the intellectual development of a one-year old, he could barely walk and he had fits every five to ten minutes. By 2001, his father was able to take him to see his first cricket match.[3] The first international patient for this surgery was American Joelle Rue in May 2000, and she was followed by regular patients from overseas.[15]

In 2001, he won international acclaim for performing life-changing surgery to remove a hypothalamic hamartoma from a nine-year-old British boy, Sebastian Selo. The technique had previously been used successfully on 18 children at that time, but Selo was the most critical; since he was a baby he suffered up to 100 epileptic fits each day and difficulty speaking, caused by a tumour the size of a grape which had grown in his brain, about 10 centimetres (4 in) down, behind his eyes. A surgery attempt in Britain four years earlier had not been successful, and caused a disabling stroke. Rosenfeld liquefied the tumour using a high-frequency aspirator so that it could then be sucked away in a four-hour operation. A year later, Selo's seizures were rare, and they did not prevent him leading a normal life. They were re-united in Great Britain when Rosenfeld visited to teach the technique to British surgeons. After the attention for that success, children from around the world were coming to the Royal Children's Hospital for the same surgery and Rosenfeld personally performed over 70 of them.[10][3][16][17][18][19]

He operated on the Australian celebrity Molly Meldrum after his brain injury, caused by a fall from a ladder in 2011.[20][21]

In 2011, he published in The New England Journal of Medicine the first multicentre randomised controlled trial about the effectiveness of decompressive craniectomy (surgically removing a section of skull to allow the pressure from swelling to abate), compared to drug therapy.[22][23]

His team has developed an artificial vision system named Gennaris that may provide a degree of sight for blind people.[24] It uses special glasses that connect wirelessly to an implant on the surface of the brain, generating a matrix of 172 spots called "phosphenes" (to expand to 473) to allow that the person to perceive a rudimentary view of whatever is there. In July 2020, the team published a report of a trial of this technology in sheep. Human trials will be next, initially with only a few volunteers, then increasing over time.[25][26][24][27] Describing the level of detail they hope the devices will provide, Rosenfeld said "They won't be able to recognise the detail of a person's face... but they will be able to recognise where a staircase is, where a door or door handle is, common things you need to navigate... in everyday life."[28]

As of November 2021, PubMed lists 291 articles with him as an author,[35] and ResearchGate lists 397.[36] Google Scholar calculates his h-index as 67.[37]

• Rosenfeld, Jeffrey (1983). Neuronal and Glial Abnormalities in Myelin Deficient Mutant Mice. University of Connecticut. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
• Rosenfeld, Jeffrey V.; Watters, David A.K. (2000). Neurosurgery in the tropics: a practical approach to common problems. London: Macmillan. ISBN 9780333684122. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
• Rosenfeld, Jeffrey V. (2005). The Surgical Treatment of Hypothalamic Hamartomas. Monash University. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
• Rosenfeld, Jeffrey (2012). Practical management of head and neck injury. Chatswood, N.S.W.: Elsevier Health Sciences. ISBN 9780729579568. Retrieved 15 August 2021.

Category Winner - Tertiary Education (Wholly Australian) Student Resource, Australian Publishers Association – Australian Educational Publishing Awards 2013.[38]

As of November 2021, Monash University also lists 27 book chapters which he has published.[39]