Neurosurgery: achievements and challenges
Konovalov, A.N.; Potapov, A.A.
Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Meditsinskikh Nauk 2: 19-24
2011
ISSN/ISBN: 0869-6047 PMID: 21516728 Document Number: 649023
Neurosurgery is one of the most dynamic and fast-developing medical sciences aimed at studying a wide range of diseases and lesions of the nervous system with constant improvement of methods of their diagnosis and surgical treatment. With the routine clinical use of computed tomography, positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance imaging the possibilities of revealing structural, metabolic and functional changes in the brain in different types of pathology have significantly enlarged. Today, methods of neurovisualization are widely used for preoperative modeling and intraoperative navigation. Also, these methods permit to study the fundamental aspects of brain functioning in health and pathology at the organ, tissue, cellular and molecular levels. In the last decades, the spectrum of neurosurgical methods including microsurgical, endoscopic, stereotactic, radiosurgical, reconstructive and other technologies was extended and diver-