[Intracranial arteriovenous malformations and radiosurgery with LINAC: review article]

Among all vascular malformations, the intracranial arteriovenous malformations (AVM's) have the most powerful impact from the clinical point of view. The manifestations include hemorrhage, seizures, headacheh, but sometimes they are incidentally found during the diagnostic approach of patients with head trauma or chronic headache. There are three different types of treatments: microsurgery, endovascular treatment and radiosurgery. The actual role of the endovascular treatment is as an adjuvant therapy before microsurgery or radiosurgery just to diminish the nidus size. The goal of all treatments is complete nidus obliteration without causing a new neurological deficit. The overall obliteration index with LINAC based radiosurgery is about 80% and the result is dose, volume and time dependent. The mean dose reported in the literature fluctuates between 15 and 25 Gy, and the isodose coverage curve for the AVM with LINAC is generally the one of the 80%. There can be a treatment failure defined as the necessity to retreat the patient after three years from the first radiosurgical treatment in about 26% of the patients. There is a lack of evidence, principally from randomized trials, to point out the role of each of the modalities in the treatment of the AVM.