Preface

This book covers humanism in neurosurgery; social support for patients with brain injury; preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative evaluation and treatment decision-making for brain tumors; the application of neuroendoscopy; the treatment of pediatric skull base tumors and hydrocephalus; and endovascular neurosurgery and neurosurgical treatment of ischemic stroke.

The book is divided into five sections. We believe that medical ethics and humanism should be mastered by all neurosurgeons and neurologists to serve our patients well, therefore we address these philosophical topics in Section I, which consists of two chapters: "Medical Humanism in Neurosurgery" and "Social Support, Identity, and Meaning: A Phenomenological Analysis of Post-Concussion Syndrome." This section provides readers with training, lectures, role modeling, and interpersonal communication training in competency, literature, and humanities studies, teaching neurosurgeons the core values of medical humanism. The level of social support can play an important role in improving and/or exacerbating the physical and psychological difficulties of patients with traumatic brain injury and post-concussion syndrome.

Section II focuses on brain tumors, including the development of imaging evaluation and surgical techniques in modern brain tumor surgery. In the past thirty years, functional neuroimaging such as fMRI, DTI, MRP, MRS, AS-PET-CT, SPECT, and TMS have been developed as non-invasive tools to visualize the inner brain and spinal functional morphology. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate that the preoperative and intraoperative application of fMRI- and DTI-based navigation can assist the safest possible removal of brain tumors. Chapter 5 outlines the interdisciplinary work of neurosurgeons, neuroanesthesiologists, and neuropsychologists in the management of brain tumors in awake patients. Chapter 6 discusses the pathological and surgical features of diffuse-multicentric versus local-peripheral recurrence of meningiomas. Chapter 7 introduces the evolution of neuroendoscopy to readers.

Section III introduces the developmental status of endovascular neurosurgery and neurosurgical treatment of ischemic stroke. Section IV covers neurosurgical treatment of spasticity due to brain and spinal cord injuries and puts forward a proposal that points to the possible path to treat spasticity in the future. This section also introduces the treatment of cervical deformity and the necessary steps that should be taken to minimize the risk of distal junctional kyphosis (DJK) post-operatively. Section V is on pediatric neurosurgery. The authors generously share their experience in managing surgical lesions of the pediatric skull base and long-term shunt-dependency in children treated for idiopathic intracranial hypertension with CSF diversion.

We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions. We would also like to acknowledge the encouragement, motivation, and assistance from the Beijing Municipal Administration of Hospitals Incubating Program (PX2020039), Beijing, China, and Tsinghua Precision Medicine Foundation (20219990008), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. We are grateful to Author Service Manager Romina Rovan at IntechOpen for her dedication and hard work to ensure the smooth publication of this book. Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Zhongcheng

Wang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the founder and pioneer of Chinese neurosurgery, for without his tireless efforts over the decades Chinese neurosurgery would not be what it is today.

> **Xianli Lv, Guihuai Wang, James Wang and Zhongxue Wu** Neurosurgery Department, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
