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Sir Alfred Cuschieri (born 30 September 1938) is a Maltese-British surgeon and academic. He is most notable for his pioneering contribution to the development and clinical implementation of minimal access surgery, also known as key-hole surgery. He has been Professor of Surgery at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, since 2003 as well as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Medical Science and Technology at the University of Dundee since 2008.
Sir Alfred Cuschieri, was born in Malta, his parents were Italian and Maltese (his father was from Florence).
In 1976, Cuschieri moved to Scotland to join the University of Dundee School of Medicine as Professor of Surgery and Chairman of the Surgery and Molecular Oncology Department. It was while working at Ninewells Hospital in the city that he and his team first began researching the medical and technological basis for minimal access surgery. Cuschieri's team took advantage of, among other internal and external ergonomic developments, smaller cameras allowing insertion into the incision made in the skin; as a result of this progress the first minimally invasive surgery in the UK was carried out at Ninewells in 1987.
A lack of appropriate training in this form of surgery, and instances of procedures going wrong even resulting in deaths, led to some concern and mistrust in the new techniques. As a result, training units were set up at hospitals and medical schools around the UK with one of the first designated in 1993 under Cuschieri's directorship. Cuschieri holds some fifty-eight patents for various surgical instruments and has been originally published around five hundred times in peer-reviewed journals. He became European Editor-in-Chief of Surgical Endoscopy in 1992.
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