Lakshmikumar Venkat Raghavan

Biography

Since he started his career in 2005, Dr. Venkatraghavan’s primary research focus has been on anesthesia and functional neurosurgery (in particular, insertion of deep brain stimulators (DBS) and epilepsy surgery). At that time, functional neurosurgery was an emerging surgical procedure for patients with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. There was no clear information on the anesthetic care of patients undergoing DBS surgery and the anesthetic agents were thought to interfere with the identification of target areas for stimulation. Dr. Venkatraghavan has published multiple articles on the perioperative anesthesia care of patients undergoing for DBS insertion. His work on epilepsy surgery has been focused on the use of intracarotid etomidate injection for WADA procedure for language and memory lateralization prior to epilepsy surgery. He has helped many centers across Canada, Europe and India with their transition to the use of etomidate for WADA procedure. Dr. Venkatraghavan’s secondary research focus is on anesthesia and functional neuroimaging. Along with his colleagues at the Toronto Western Hospital, Dr. Venkatraghavan has been working on the technique of measuring cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to carbon dioxide using BOLD -MRI and precise targeting of carbon dioxide. With funding from a UHN MSH AHSC AMO AFP Innovation Fund Award, they have shown that this technique can be used as a feasible, non-invasive, fast, reproducible “brain stress” test to identify patients with poor cerebrovascular reserve, i.e. at risk for stroke. His current work focuses on the role of functional imaging of brain as a tool to predict the clinical outcome in patients with neuropathic pain and to study the feasibility of precise targeting of Co2 in mechanically ventilated patients using a sequential breathing circuit. Currently he is working as a Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesia at the University of Toronto.

Research Interest

neuroanesthesia