Supratentorial meningiomas of the skull base

Different lasers are today used in many neurosurgical centers, in clinical practice or in basic and clinical research. Even if the laser effects have been studied in other pathological conditions, the laser technology has been mostly applied to the treatment of intracranial tumors. This paper will be mainly concerned with the aspects of surgical technique regarding the supratentorial meningiomas of the skull base, derived from our experience with a series of skull base meningiomas operated on between January 1981 and July 1996. The subject of our analysis are 110 patients who underwent a total of 121 operations. In addition to simple bipolar coagulation and removal of the mass in small coagulated fragments, we have utilized various lasers with different sources of emission, namely CO2, Argon and Nd:YAG. The CO2 laser was utilized in 10 cases, the Argon laser in 2 cases and the Nd:YAG laser in 27 cases in both the contact and remote modalities. Among these last 27 patients a total removal was achieved in 96 percent, against 86 percent obtained in the remaining 83 meningiomas. Six patients were reoperated on for recurrences; none of them had been operated on using the Nd:YAG laser.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.