http://www.or-live.com/stmarysmadison/2088 Madison, WI: At 4 p.m. CDT on May 13, 2008, St. Mary's Hospital will give viewers the rare opportunity to watch a lumbar spine microdiscectomy live. Join Dean and St. Mary's Spine Center physicians who will present the procedure and discuss how they minimize patients' pain and speed recovery. Performing the surgery and providing expert narration, insight and answers to viewer questions will be: neurosurgeons Dr. Richard L. Carter, Dr. Alan Lozier, Dr. Jeff Masciopinto and Dr. Todd Trier and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Keith Kahle. Spinal microdiscectomy is a minimally invasive surgery, done to decompress a painful nerve root by removing disk fragments from a herniated disk, usually in the lower back (lumbar area). Unlike lumbar spine surgery that requires an incision 2 to 5 inches long, microdiscectomy is performed with a microscope through a very small incision (about 1 to 1 ½ inches). The surgery will be webcast for one hour from St. Mary's Hospital's brand new, state-of-the-art operating rooms. The Dean and St. Mary's Spine Center performs more spine surgeries than any other program in southcentral Wisconsin, with an interdisciplinary team of five surgeons, specializing in neurosurgery and orthopedics. An archived version of the live webcast will be available online after May 13th.