No one can deny the importance of neuronavigation facilities which became a cornerstone in most of the neurosurgical theaters worldwide. In the late eighties of the last century, there was a revolutionary appearance of spatial neuroimaging together with pointing instruments that provided three dimensional data, which in turn led to the development of “frameless stereotaxy” concept which consequently yielded the expression of “Navigation systems” after improvement of guidance and orientation abilities [3]. Multiple modalities of navigation systems then appeared with increasing efficiency to the extent that they helped the neurosurgeons to plan different procedures interactively, making the approaches less invasive and more accurate especially for subcortical lesions[4–6]. but on the other hand those facilities failed to achieve so much popularity among the society of neurosurgery regarding routine craniotomies.[1]
In most cases of claverial meningiomas and other extra-axial lesions, the neurosurgeon may not be compelled to use neuronavigation since most of the lesions are easily accessible immediately after craniotomy [2]. The only concern that might be worrying in those cases is the size of craniotomy. A suitable size in many opinions is to be slightly larger than the tumor size, giving the surgeons the space needed for dissection of the tumor away from neurovascular structures, on the other hand a small flab makes the surgery more difficult and more risky, also an extremely larger flab carries the risk of more blood loss and unnecessary exposure of normal neural structures [7].
Despite the expenses of installment of intra-operative navigation system, Paleologos et al found that cumulative cost for the overall hospital stay is cheaper when the clavarial meningiomas were operated with IGS. They took in consideration a lot of factors including the extra radiological work up that is needed for the navigation guidance and still it was cheaper, they attributed the decreased cost to less ICU (Intensive Care Unit) stay and less postoperative complications in the meningioma patients operated by navigation[2]. But even with this assumption, many tertiary care hospitals in our country lack navigation devices in their operation rooms (OR) due to budgetary difficulties that render purchasing of both hardware and software of the navigation systems primarily, which in turn reduce the dependence on these technologies among the neurosurgeons. Consequently, the neurosurgeons throughout our country, reserve the navigation assistance to operate upon deep and small lesions in more equipped yet few centers. So, we conducted this study to check if it is safe to operate upon claverial meningiomas without navigation. Although we found a statistical significance between the conventional and IGS methods in anticipating the tumor center, yet we believe that the conventional method is of accepted accuracy and the error difference for each case is trivial as long as the conventional method was carried out by a senior and well trained neurosurgeon. Sun et al also concluded that surgical planning for parasagittal meningiomas removal can be conducted safely using the craniometric points[8].
Of course the presence of navigation within OR settings is reassuring to the neurosurgeon, one can feel more confident while operating, knowing that there is an available tool that can help in accurate planning of the surgery with good anticipation for any nearby vascular structures[9][10], yet the neurosurgeons in the developing countries can bear with more worrying feelings for the sake of curing patients from this benign tumors in the limited resources setting whenever it is safe to operate.
On the contrary, the linear method has a relative advantage over IGS in reducing the overall anesthesia time. We found a statistically significant difference in planning time between both methods, the IGS requires several steps to be functioning probably, whereas the linear method requires much simpler steps in localization with accepted accuracy counting on the experience of the surgical team to translate the radiological studies and to match the tumor location to the patients' cranium based on the anatomical landmarks. This reduction in anesthesia time could help in decreasing the rate of extracranial complications such as venous thromboembolic episodes [11,12], postoperative pneumonia[13] and Urinary tract infections[14].