Neurosurgical concepts and approaches for orbital tumours

Abstract

Orbital tumours are lesions that appear within the orbital craniofacial borders. To this end, treatment of these tumours is assured by teams of different specialists. Furthermore, these pathologies are different in adults and in children. We have endeavoured, in this chapter, to highlight the specifically neurosurgical features of orbital tumours or, to be more precise, tumours affecting the posterior two thirds of the orbit and tumours originating in or intruding into the optic canal. The list of aetiologies is long. After recapitulating the main types of tumour (as well as those of most concern), we have also studied the different stages of surgery, namely approaches and reconstructions which we have illustrated at each stage by a tumour that, in our view, seemed emblematic of the problem in question: the lateral eyebrow approach for schwannoma and cavernous angioma, the transorbital subfrontal approach for optic nerve glioma, the pterional and orbital approaches for spheno-orbital meningioma, problems with reconstruction and with plexiform neurofibroma affecting the orbit and fibrous dysplasia of bone.