Omovertebral bone associated with Sprengel deformity and Klippel-Feil syndrome leading to cervical myelopathy.

The unusual association of an omovertebral bone with Sprengel deformity and Klippel-Feil syndrome is a complex bone anomaly of unknown incidence and etiology. However, several cases of this rare disease pattern have been reported in the literature. In this paper, the authors present the case of a 34-year-old woman with a 5-month history of progressive gait ataxia and intermittent urinary incontinence, which was found to be caused by aberrant bone growth into the spinal canal from an omovertebral bone that extended from the left scapula pressing into the C-6 vertebral arch and subsequently causing cervical myelopathy.

Magnetically guided neuronavigation of flexible instruments in shunt placement, transsphenoidal procedures, and craniotomies.

Objective: Magnetically guided neuronavigation of flexible instruments is a new tool that can be used in the frameless navigation of deep-seated lesions or shunt placements. Disadvantages of optical systems such as the line-of-sight problem, the necessity of rigid pin fixation of the head, and missing tracking of the tip of flexible instruments should be solved by the new tracking system. Until now, the accuracy of magnetically guided systems was mostly estimated in laboratory setups.

Effects of drug efflux on convection-enhanced paclitaxel delivery to malignant gliomas: technical note.

Objective: Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is an approach in local brain tumor treatment. The spread of infusate in CED can be thought of as involving three phases: backflow, convection, and diffusion. Uncontrolled backflow may lead to efflux of the infusate outside the cranium.

Clinical utility of a patient-specific algorithm for simulating intracerebral drug infusions.

Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is a novel drug delivery technique that uses positive infusion pressure to deliver therapeutic agents directly into the interstitial spaces of the brain. Despite the promise of CED, clinical trials have demonstrated that target-tissue anatomy and patient-specific physiology play a major role in drug distribution using this technique. In this study, we retrospectively tested the ability of a software algorithm using MR diffusion tensor imaging to predict patient-specific drug distributions by CED.