Mehran Anvari
Mehran Anvari’s ancestry can be traced back more than a millennium to the fall of the Persian Empire. For hundreds of years and despite significant pressure and persecution, generations of Mehran Anvari’s family remained Zoroastrian, until the 1850s when they embraced the Bahá’í Faith.
Mehran Anvari is Director of the Centre for Minimal Access Surgery at McMaster University.
Born in Iran in 1959, Mehran Anvari was destined for a life in medicine. His father, Nooraldin, and mother, Noorangiz, were pharmacists in Tehran until the Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran in 1978. To avoid persecution and possible death, the family emigrated to Canada, settling in Grimsby, Ontario. Mehran Anvari had already completed his formal education in England, and he returned there the same year his family emigrated to Canada, enrolling at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to complete his medical degree.
After completing a one-year internship, Dr. Anvari returned to Canada in 1984 and enlisted in postgraduate training at McMaster University, where he completed a training programme in surgery. To further his studies in surgery, Dr. Anvari travelled to Adelaide, Australia, to work with Professors John Dent and Glyn Jamieson, who were pioneers in gastrointestinal mobility at the University of Adelaide. After three years of additional training, Dr. Anvari graduated with a Ph.D. in gastric motor function and the influence of gastric surgery. Anxious to rejoin his family in Canada, Dr. Anvari set up a clinical practice in 1992 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, and was appointed Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Surgery at McMaster University.
Made director of the Centre for Minimal Access Surgery (CMAS) at McMaster University in 1999, Dr. Anvari is recognized internationally as an expert in the field of minimal-access surgery. The major benefits to patients with this type of surgery are less pain and surgical trauma, shorter hospital stays, and faster recovery. His revolutionary treatment of gastrointestinal disorders has brought lucrative offers to go elsewhere. He has remained in Canada, however, because its multicultural policies are closest to his own spiritual beliefs.
Dr. Anvari is on the brink of bringing his advanced techniques to remote areas of Canada. Since 1999, he and 70 colleagues have been using live long-distance videoconferencing with rural surgeons as they perform operations. This “telementoring” is done so that the specialist can see what is going on and talk to the surgeon during the procedure. Wearing 3-D glasses and twisting the controls of a scalpel-equipped robotic arm, Dr. Anvari is helping to sculpt the next frontier in medicine: telerobotic surgery.
On 28 February 2003, Dr. Anvari, Dr. Craig McKinley, and their respective surgical teams made history when they performed the world’s first hospital-to-hospital telerobotics-assisted surgery. Telementoring from St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton, Dr. Anvari successfully collaborated with Dr. McKinley, a General Surgeon at North Bay General Hospital, in completing a laparoscopic surgical operation on Dr. McKinley’s patient in North Bay, nearly 400 kilometres from Hamilton. Dr. Anvari’s hand, wrist, and finger movements were translated from a console, with a delay of no longer than 150 milliseconds, to control the endoscopic camera and surgical instruments in the abdomen of the patient.
Read more about Dr. Anvari’s work on the Bahá’í World News Service.