Division of the Month - Pediatric Surgery

Stollery Children's Hospital

Not only is the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton internationally renowned but so is the research that the Division of Pediatric Surgery carries out. Dr. Bryan Dicken has an ongoing collaboration through the children’s oncology group internationally to improve care for children.  He published a joint paper in the last year on Extracranial Malignant Germ Cell Tumors in the journal Pediatric Blood and Cancer, with numerous other papers before that.  Dr. Troy Perry collaborates locally with our pediatric gastroenterology group on the basic science of inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Abdullah Saleh continues to make a global impact through not-for-profit organizations that not only improve the medical health of children but all aspects of lives in underprivileged communities, including local rural communities in Alberta.

Dr. Hamdy ElHakim holds an adjunct appointment as Professor of Otolaryngology in Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt and is hosting the Third Edmonton Pediatric Dysphagia Symposium on September 20th. This has a strong international presence and collaboration with four USA excellence centers (Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Children's Hospital in Houston, Texas, UCLA Children's Hospital, and Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago | Pediatric Medicine).  He is also leading a research project in collaboration with. e Northern Institute of Deep Learning in Ultrasound to create an artificial intelligence model for reading and classifying videos of functional endoscopic evaluation of swallowing for children.  Dr. Andre Isaac obtained a WCHRI grant to study vocal cord paralysis after cardiac surgery and the outcomes of laryngeal reinnervation surgery. This is new to the Stollery Children’s Hospital.  He also helped spearhead the Moi Surgical Initiative.  This is an international partnership with Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya. Last year they performed several airway reconstructions and are publishing the results and educational outcomes.

Our pediatric spine group has also been active with grants and publications.  In 2024 the collaborative group has produced 9 publications alone. Sarah Southon Hryniuk, and Dr. Kyle Stampe collaborated with Edmond Lou from the Department of Electrical and computing engineering and were awarded grants to fund artificial intelligence models to estimate current and future spinal curvatures for AIS using ultrasound and surface topography parameter and to predict race treatment outcomes for adolescents with Idiopathic Scoliosis. They along with Dr. Eric Huang also received a grant for the advanced assessment and treatment for Scoliosis.

These are some of the significant accomplishments from members within the Division of Pediatric Surgery. Many more people make valuable additions daily and help build the national and international reputation of Pediatric Surgery at the University of Alberta.