The State of the Art in Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery
1Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
2Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong, Seoul, Republic of Korea
3Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka, Japan
4Desert Institute for Spine Care, Arizona, USA
5West China Hospital at Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
The State of the Art in Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery
Description
With the aids of modern optic technologies and instruments refinement in the last 2 decades, minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS) has been applied increasingly and does show its merits in the patients. The development of MISS including thoracoscopic, microendoscopic, percutaneous endoscopic, percutaneous vertebroplasty, ultrasound-guided pain management, and navigation or robotic assisted surgery has evolved rapidly. Both merits and disadvantages have been discussed and critically analyzed during the practice of these minimal invasive techniques in treating patients with spinal disorders. However, why these techniques have low tissue invasiveness to patient’s body and same or even better outcome with comparison to standard open surgery had not been well reported. Recently, the important role of percutaneous endoscopic interlaminar surgery has been reevaluated in patients with degenerative disc or stenosis; this technique does work very satisfactorily as other procedures and has become a daily surgery practice. However, we must say that MISS is still in its evolving stage thus far. Issues such as the learning curves, the need of training in anterior spine surgery, cost and benefits, and potential complications need constant analyses. Moreover, radiation exposure is a matter of great concern to the surgeons.
In this special issue, we warmly welcome researchers to send their original works as well as review articles in the field of MISS to us.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Microendoscopic discectomy (MED)
- Minimally invasive lumbar interbody fusion (oblique, lateral, posterior, and anterior)
- Percutaneous endoscopic discectomy (PED)/laminectomy (PEL) at lumbar or cervical regions
- Thoracoscopic spine surgery
- Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PV)
- Debates on the role of interspinous process implants
- Fluoroscopic or ultrasound-guided pain management
- Pitfalls, complications, or radiation hazards in MISS
- Navigation-guided or robotic-assisted spine surgery