Vestibular Schwannoma: Current State of the Art.

"If any neurologic surgeon were asked to name the most difficult tumor to extirpate, his answer would doubtless be the acoustic tumor." Dandy (1941) [10] Approximately seven decades separate this comment from current days. In this interim, several developments regarding imaging modalities and microsurgical techniques, as well as intraoperative neuromonitoring have been responsible for significant reductions in the morbidity of patients suffering from cerebellopontine angle (CPA) pathologies [25, 37, 55, 67, 70]. The progress of neurosurgery as a specialty is intrinsically related to the history of treatment for acoustic neuroma (vestibular schwannoma) [70]. Dealing with vestibular schwannomas (VSs) has developed from almost a death sentence at the beginning of the century [29, 55, 67] to the current concept of "functional microsurgery" [68]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]