DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

The journal Oncology Times published an article about “Oncologists Using Twitter to Advance Cancer Knowledge” on their website. And they notified me, using Twitter of course, that my profile is mentioned in the PDF version of the article (free download from their website).

@OncologyTimes on @DigNeurosurgeon

Also, the editors of Neurosurgery have started using Twitter, and I am glad to be in their “following” category. They already retweeted a message on the NeuroMind app. Curious to know if they like SLIC as well…

Anyhow, it’s nice to see that Twitter also gets adopted for “serious use” instead of just notifying that somebody has just eaten breakfast. We’ll see how it evolves in the future!

Cervical spine injury is a topic that remains difficult in my opinion. When can I consider the spine to be “stable” (no abnormal motion) and when is external stabilization indicated. Prescribing a Halo-vest for 12 weeks is not really a nice thing to do if unnecessary. On the other hand, not prescribing it when it is necessary, is even worse. Fortunately, help is on its way!

Vaccaro et al published two very helpful articles on this topic. The first article describes the subaxial cervical spine injury classification system (SLIC). The second article describes an evidence-based algorithm that will assist surgeons in answering the 2 most common questions they face when managing subaxial cervical spine trauma: “Should I operate?” and “Which surgical approach should I select?”

I already implemented the first article in the iPhone app before I found the second, that one will come later. Here is a screenshot, with two different kinds of layout (click on the image for a large version).

SLIC on iPhone

The second layout (on the right) came across this morning… accidentally. I changed some settings, and I found this result. Which I like better!! There is more space for text, and less “unused space”. In the meantime, I do not have the impression that it gets too crowded. And yes, I know that I need to increase the height of the lower cell a little in the new version. That’s easily done!

What layout do you think is best: the left (old) or the right (new) one? Let me know!

Today I added two articles on traumatic brain injury (TBI) to my iPhone application. One article is about mannitol in acute TBI, the other is about decompressive craniectomy (DC) for treating a refractory high intracranial pressure after TBI.

Click on image for large version

I was surprised to find that there is more evidence for DC in a pediatric population. Actually, there is none for adults, although the authors explicitly state in the text that it may still be of added value.

Regarding mannitol, I’ll have to read an article on other solutions (literally and as a figure of speech…)

I needed to have some more literature on pediatric neuro-oncology, and today I did a PubMed search to expand my list. Found some interesting articles, one of which I highly recommend for residents.

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Cordonnier et al (2008) describe the differences between intracranial vascular malformation types in the characteristics of their presenting haemorrhages.

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I have just read the article from Shih and Pan (2005) on management of supratentorial cavernous malformations (CMs).

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I’ve been using Papers for almost a year now, and I love it! This “personal library of science” offers a very pleasant way to keep track of all scientific literature that I collect.

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