Maxillary surgical seeding of a clival chordoma.

Seeding on surgical pathway is a rare form of clival chordoma treatment failure. We report the case of a 42-year-old male with a clival chondroid chordoma removed by a sublabial transsphenoidal approach followed by proton beam radiotherapy, who developed a maxillary bone recurrence 3 years after surgery.

Post-traumatic meningioma: three case reports of this rare condition and a review of the literature.

We present three cases of meningiomas developing at the site of an old head trauma. We then review the literature regarding the controversies on the development of post-traumatic brain tumors and, finally, we emphasize the medico-legal characteristics of post-traumatic meningiomas, particularly with respect to their cell type which is frequently atypical or anaplastic and which have a poor outcome.

Anterior transpetrosal and subtemporal transtentorial approaches for pontine cavernomas.

Objective: Pontine cavernomas are benign vascular lesions whose surgical treatment is challenging due to their localization. We report our experience in the surgical management of these lesions exclusively using a lateral, subtemporal transtentorial approach in high pontine lesions and an anterior petrosal approach in low pontine lesions.

Methods: We performed a retrospective study on a series of patients who were operated on for a pontine cavernoma in our neurosurgery department between 1987 and 2007.