Introduction The surgical management of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy is changing rapidly as newer methods of diagnosis and treatment are discovered and enter clinical practice. The International League Against Epilepsy defines drug-resistant epilepsy as seizures that continue despite treatment with…
In 1940, William P. van Wagenen and R. Yorke Herren described a small series of patients with various disruptive lesions of the corpus callosum. Their report highlighted the phenomenologic distinction between generalized convulsive seizures in individuals with tumors near the…
Multilobar Resections The rationale of curative surgical procedures aiming at control of focal drug-resistant epilepsy is total inactivation (by resection or disconnection) of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) (i.e., the cortical region of onset and early spread of an ictal discharge).…
Introduction Extratemporal lobe epilepsy (ETLE) comprises debilitating conditions of heterogeneous symptomatology and pathology, both challenging to diagnose and to treat yet amenable to several surgical interventions. ETLE is defined as localization-related epilepsy with the electrophysiological epileptogenic zone outside the temporal…
Epilepsy affects 1% of the world’s population and incurs an enormous burden of disease. One-third of patients with epilepsy fail to achieve adequate seizure control with antiepileptic drugs or cannot tolerate their side effects. In temporal lobe epilepsy, patients may…
Introduction When we decide that surgery is an option for treating epilepsy, there are a number of considerations we have to make. First and most important, the decision of operating on a patient with seizures does not reside in one…
Introduction Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) is a minimally invasive percutaneous procedure that involves the stereotactic insertion of a fiberoptic catheter and delivery of non-ionized photons into a predetermined intracranial location to thermally ablate specific anatomical structures or lesions. Laser…
Trigeminal Neuralgia Introduction Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is currently the most common among functional indications (approximately 90%) in the radiosurgical field, as stated by the Leksell Gamma Knife Society statistics. It has been named “tic douloureux” by Nicholas André, a French…
Introduction Brain arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) are rare, congenital anomalies of blood vessels with an estimated incidence and prevalence of 1.12 to 1.34 and 10 to 50 cases per 100,000, respectively. They are typically a tangle of dysplastic vessels within the…
Introduction/Background The average annual incidence of intracranial meningiomas (MNs) is five to six new cases per 100,000 person/years, with the age-related risk drastically increasing from the pediatric population to a peak during the sixth and seventh decades. , In adults…