Surgery of intramedullary spinal cord tumours

MRI and Cusa have significantly modified the diagnosis and the treatment of intramedullary tumours. Our experience, based on 66 cases, is in favour of surgery performed when the patient's neurological status is still good. Radical surgery, whenever possible, is the best treatment and can be achieved for many histological diagnoses, even in gliomas where we succeeded in 36% of the cases. Surgery is the only way to be sure of the exact histological diagnosis of the lesion which can be suggested in 70% of the cases but not confirmed by MRI.