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Surgical Anatomy of and Approaches Through the Lateral Foramen Magnum: The Transcondylar Fossa and Transcondylar Approaches

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Microsurgical Anatomy and Surgery of the Posterior Cranial Fossa

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Abstract

Approaches passing through the lateral part of the foramen magnum—the lateral foramen magnum approaches—are utilized to reach lesions at the distal vertebral artery (VA), including those at the bifurcation of VA and posterior inferior cerebellar artery (PICA), on the anterolateral surface of the brainstem, or near the midline of the clivus [1–5, 10, 11, 26, 31, 33, 39–44]. These approaches have been in development since the latter half of the 1980s. Of the lateral foramen magnum approaches, the far lateral approach of Heros, posterolateral approach of Perneczky, transcondylar approach of Bertalanffy and Seeger, and extreme lateral approach of Sen and Sekhar are the most important and widely known [5, 11, 39, 41]. Illustrations in Fig. 17.1 from their original articles show their boney openings.

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  1. Department of Neurosurgery Faculty of Medicine, Saga University, Saga, Japan

    Toshio Matsushima

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Matsushima, T. (2015). Surgical Anatomy of and Approaches Through the Lateral Foramen Magnum: The Transcondylar Fossa and Transcondylar Approaches. In: Microsurgical Anatomy and Surgery of the Posterior Cranial Fossa. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54183-7_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54183-7_17

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