William Howard Feindel OC GOQ FRSC (July 12, 1918 – January 12, 2014[1]) was a Canadian neurosurgeon, scientist and professor.
[3] Attending Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar he received his D. Phil in 1949.
[4][5] After completing his residency, Feindel was in neurosurgical practice for two years with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
During this tenure he led a clinical neuroscience team to acquire the first CAT and combined MRI/S units in Canada and to develop the world's first PET system utilizing a prototype Japanese "Baby" cyclotron and the MNI-designed BGO crystal PET scanner for detecting brain tumours and stroke.
In the early 1950s, during brain mapping studies with Penfield and Jasper, Feindel discovered the role of the amygdala in patients with temporal lobe seizures, which, with related studies at the MNI, led to the operation of antero-mesial temporal lobe resection often referred to as "the Montreal procedure", an operation adopted worldwide for the surgical cure of many thousands of patients with epilepsy.