Previous appointments held by Dr Chou Ning include:
Dr Chou Ning had spent three years from 1994 to 1997 at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, UK. Dr Chou Ning was sent by the Ministry of Health, when he was awarded the Human Manpower Development Planning for Neurosurgery.
He had trained at the Royal London Hospital under Dr Tom King who pioneered the Translabrinthine Approach for
Acoustic Neuroma. Dr Chou Ning was the last registrar to train under Dr Tom King. Dr Tom King was trained under the master neurosurgeon, Northfields.
Between 1994 to 1997, Dr Chou Ning also trained under eminent master NeuroSurgeons like Dr Afshar who would routinely complete a transphenoidal resection of Pituitary Tumor under an operative time of an hour.
Upon his return to Singapore, Dr Chou Ning was soon appointed as Head of the NeuroSurgical unit at the National University of Singapore. Over a span of more than two decades, Dr Chou Ning developed the NeuroSurgical unit from an operative case load of 250 cases per year to about 1000 operative cases per year.
Dr Chou Ning was particularly interested in neurosurgical microvascular techniques. As a result, Dr Chou Ning organised numerous international training cadaveric courses with eminent speakers like Prof Rhoton, USA and Prof Rodney Lang, Addenbrookes, Cambridge, UK and Prof Axel Perneczky, Johannes Gutternburg University, Mainz, Germany.
Dr Chou Ning was also instrumental in reviving the surgical technique of External Carotid – Internal Carotid Bypass. This surgical technique was vital in lowering mortality for symptomatic critical cerebral ischaemia (especially in Moya Moya disease) in the first year from 37% in the conservatively managed group to 17% in the surgical EC-IC bypass group.
In 2007, Dr Chou Ning organised a live surgery symposium whereby Dr Chou Ning demonstrated two cases of cerebral Bypass to an international audience with live commentary to highlight the nuances of the various aspects and indications of successful cerebral bypass surgery.
Till date, Dr Chou Ning has clipped more than 300 anterior circulation aneurysms over a period spanning more than 2 decades of neurosurgical practice in the public sector.
Dr Chou Ning was especially interested in improving the surgical technique of retrosigmoid approach for Cerebro-pontine angle tumors. Operative time for this cohort of surgery has been reduced from more than 24 hours to less than 6 hours.
Till date, Dr Chou Ning’s operative mortality for this group of patient has been ZERO with resection of greater than 90% tumor volume and preservation of 95% of facial nerve function.
Dr Chou Ning also pioneered an award winning translational research in which a Bioabsorbable scaffold was placed in a skull defect to allow bone cells to migrate into. With subsequent absorption of the bio-scaffold, the skull defect is covered by patient’s own bone.
This research won the Far East Economic Review Scientific research award and the prestigious IE Engineering award in Singapore. The much coveted FDA approval and CE Approval were obtained for this ground breaking biomedical research. The company “Osteopore International” had since undergone IPO in Australia.
