Surgery that treats disorders of brain and nerve function — movement disorders, epilepsy, severe psychiatric illness, and chronic pain — by precisely modulating or interrupting the circuits responsible. An independent educational overview for patients and referring clinicians.
Request a consultationMost neurosurgery treats a structural problem — a tumor, a bleed, a compressed nerve. Functional neurosurgery is different: it treats disorders of how the nervous system works. The anatomy may look normal, but a circuit is misfiring — producing a tremor, a seizure, an obsession, or relentless pain. The goal is to correct that activity while preserving everything else.
The work is stereotactic: targets deep in the brain are reached with millimeter precision using image-guided planning, often through a small opening or, increasingly, with no incision at all. Two strategies run through the whole field — modulating a circuit with an adjustable, reversible implanted device, or interrupting it with a small, precise lesion. The same toolbox — deep brain stimulation, focused ultrasound, radiosurgery, and connectivity-guided targeting — is applied across four broad areas.
This site is an independent educational overview. Each area links to a dedicated, in-depth guide.
Functional neurosurgery is organized around the kind of problem being treated. Each area below has its own detailed guide — the conditions it covers, how candidates are evaluated, and the specific procedures available.
Movement disorders, epilepsy, severe psychiatric illness, and chronic pain look like entirely different problems — but they share a logic. Each is, at its core, a disorder of a circuit: a network of brain regions and the pathways between them, firing in a pattern that produces symptoms. Functional neurosurgery intervenes at a precise node of that circuit.
Increasingly, the target is chosen not from anatomy alone but from each patient's own structural connectivity — tractography that maps the white-matter pathways a given target engages, so an intervention reaches the intended network and spares the rest. This connectivity-guided approach is a focus of the research program at the Neuronium Neuroscience Institute, and it runs through all four areas of care.
The same core technologies appear across movement, epilepsy, psychiatric, and pain surgery — applied to different targets for different conditions.
Dr. Atik is a neurosurgeon whose practice focuses on stereotactic and functional neurosurgery across its full range — deep brain stimulation and focused ultrasound for movement disorders, surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy, neuromodulation and lesioning for treatment-resistant psychiatric illness, and procedures for chronic pain.
Alongside clinical work, he conducts research on network-level analysis of brain circuits and on integrating each patient's structural connectivity into surgical targeting. This research program is housed at the Neuronium Neuroscience Institute, an independent research entity.
This site is independent and educational. It is not affiliated with any hospital or health system and does not, by itself, constitute medical advice.
If you are a patient or family member exploring whether functional neurosurgery might help — or a clinician considering a referral — you can use the form below to start a conversation. If you already know your area of interest, the dedicated guides (movement, epilepsy, psychiatric, pain) each have their own contact form. Please share only what you are comfortable putting in writing.