Neuromonitoring Guided Vessel Identification in Iatrogenic Arterial Injury During Meningioma Resection

ABSTRACT

Neuromonitoring is commonly used in neurosurgery and allows intraoperative assessment of functional pathways in the brain during surgery. Monitoring alerts can guide surgical decision making in real-time allowing surgeons to mitigate or avoid potential iatrogenic injury and subsequent postoperative neurologic sequelae that may result from cerebral ischemia or malperfusion. Here we present a case of a patient undergoing a right pterional craniotomy for the resection of a tumor which crosses midline with multimodal intraoperative neuromonitoring including somatosensory evoked potentials, transcranial motor evoked potentials, and visual evoked potentials. During the final portion of tumor resection, arterial bleeding was noted of unknown origin shortly followed by loss of right lower extremity motor evoked potential recordings. Motor evoked potential recordings in the right upper, and left upper and lower extremities were stable, as well as all somatosensory evoked potentials and visual evoked potentials. This distinct pattern of right lower extremity motor-evoked potential loss suggested compromise of the contralateral anterior cerebral artery and guided the surgeons to a rapid intervention. The patient awoke from surgery with moderate postoperative weakness in the affected limb that resolved to preoperative status by postoperative day 2, and back to normal strength prior to three-month follow-up. In this case the neuromonitoring data suggested compromise to the contralateral anterior cerebral artery which guided the surgeons to investigate and identify the site of vascular injury. The present case reinforces the utility of neuromonitoring in emergent surgical situations to guide surgical decision making.

KEY WORDS:

• Craniotomy
• meningioma
• motor-evoked potentials
• neuromonitoring
• neurophysiology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.