ABSTRACT
Stereotactic brain biopsy (SBB) is a technique of undisputed value in today’s neurosurgery. It provides a straightforward and highly precise means of obtaining diagnostic tissue within the skull or brain with minimal damage to the surrounding structures. Although there has been remarkable technical progress in this area, the basic principle of advancing an instrument under geometric and anatomic guidance is based on the principles established by Horsley and Clarke (1) and their first stereotactic frame for animal experiments in 1908. These achievements led the way to the development of various devices for human stereotaxy, referenced to X rays of anatomic structures as visualized using pneumoencephalography (2,3). The advent of computerized tomography (CT) in the early 1970s, however, marked the beginning of the modern era in brain biopsy. SBB using reference frames guided by CT scans (4,5), and later magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (6), became commonplace.
