Dr. Miguel Angel Medina III, M.D. (English)

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[Transcript]

[Miami Cancer Institute, Baptist Health South Florida]

[Miguel Angel Medina III, M.D., Director of Microsurgery]
I'm Dr. Miguel Medina, and I am the Director of Microsurgery at the Miami Cancer Institute.

[What inspired you to become a doctor?]

[Dr. Miguel Angel Medina III]
I had a pretty significant laceration to my wrist. The hand surgeons were really very kind to me as a little child, and I fortunately had no significant injuries other than the cut. But the whole experience sort of made me begin to think about surgery and mechanical and technical aspect of it caught me, I think, from a very early age.

[What is microsurgery?]

[Dr. Miguel Angel Medina III]
Microsurgery involves the transplantation of tissues from one side of the body to another. And the reason it's called microsurgery is that we take very small blood vessels that are approximately a millimeter or two millimeters in width, and we reattach them and sew them into a new location.

[How do you see your field changing?]

[Dr. Miguel Angel Medina III]
Our specialty has gone a huge revolution. The beginning of that revolution was the ability to transplant tissue as we do, where we completely detach a piece of tissue and transplant it to, say, the neck or the breast, to create a breast. And that technology has really evolved from taking a lot of tissue, to taking very specialized tissues. And our focus now is not just a successful reconstruction, but to really minimize the effect of the donor site where we're taking this tissue from. The big picture is at some point we'll have off the shelf tissues, instead of having to take from one place of the body, that we can take cells from somebody and repopulate a construct, and then transplant that construct.

[What sets Miami Cancer Institute apart?]

[Dr. Miguel Angel Medina III]
It brings all of the relevant physicians under one roof. And having everyone under one roof allows the patient to really be able to come to a single facility, and have all of their major cancer care delivered. It really allows for a multidisciplinary comprehensive evaluation of each patient.

[End Transcript]