Dr. Brian W. Hanak, Neurosurgery

Dr. Brian Hanak is a board-certified pediatric neurosurgeon at CHOC in Orange County, California. As an expert in pediatric neurosurgery, Dr. Hanak cares for babies, kids, and teens with a wide variety of neurologic conditions. He performs a full range of neurosurgical procedures including but not limited to: brain/spine tumor surgery, brain/spine vascular malformation surgery, management of congenital spine malformations including spina bifida, revascularization procedures for Moyamoya disease/syndrome, procedures for hydrocephalus management including neuro-endoscopic procedures when appropriate, craniosynostosis surgery, neurosurgical interventions to manage brain/spine trauma, and surgical interventions for medically intractable epilepsy.

Dr. Hanak serves as the neurosurgical consultant for CHOC’s Multidisciplinary Spina Bifida Clinic as well as CHOC’s Multidisciplinary Neurovascular Clinic.  He frequently serves as the neurosurgical consultant for CHOC’s Fetal Care Center of Southern California to provide prenatal counseling to families when congenital brain/spine abnormalities are diagnosed in utero.  Dr. Hanak is also a member of the AANS/CNS Joint Section on Pediatric Neurosurgery Executive Committee (primary pediatric neurosurgery society in the US) given his role as co-chair of the Industry Relations Committee.

Dr. Hanak has diverse research interests, but he primarily focuses on developing strategies to mitigate the innate immune response mounted to implanted devices placed in the brain and spine, the pathophysiology of acquired hydrocephalus, and developing less invasive/destructive neurosurgical approaches to address pediatric pathologies.  Dr. Hanak’s laboratory-based research is largely driven by a desire to develop more failure resistant devices to manage hydrocephalus as, currently, the commercially available cerebrospinal fluid shunts placed by neurosurgeons worldwide are the most failure prone life sustaining implantable device in modern medicine.  In the clinical setting Dr. Hanak has published manuscripts detailing innovative surgical techniques he has developed to address pathology with less morbidity. Recent publications detailing the management of a high cervical spine bone tumor with a single injection of doxycycline foam (rather than pursuing a major surgery which would require spine fusion) and the management of a patient with achondroplasia and debilitating pain from pinched nerve roots in the low back using a novel surgical technique that eliminated the need to disrupt spine stabilizing ligaments serve as examples of his passion for developing novel surgical strategies to improve patient outcomes.