Yelda Özsunar - Atlas of Clinical Cases on Brain Tumor Imaging

With our well-known and accomplished authors who are competent in their fields, we believe that we have prepared a book which will be found interesting and beneficial about brain tumors.

Brain tumors are one of the most challenging diseases of neuroradiology not only in terms of diagnosis but also in management aspect. For example, glioblastomas (GBM), which encounter about half of the glial tumors, are still one of the most deadly tumors, despite the significant development of molecular and imaging technologies and advanced therapy methods.

In the last three decades, survival rates for GBM have shown no notable improvement. Therefore, we believe that the integration of most recent developments, such as genomic knowledge with clinical and imaging experience, might potentially improve the management of this devastating disease. In most cases, decision-making in diagnosis and therapy is complex and needs close interdiciplinary teamwork. Therefore, we tried to accomplish a multidiciplinary approach for preparing this book. We presented our book in two parts: The first part is the general, multidiciplinary explanation of most recent developments and basic knowledge about the brain tumors. The second part represents several imaging samples of brain tumors with brief but important explanations.

Translation of pathological and clinical findings to a simple and illustrative teaching tool is very important. Most radiologists and clinicians prefer not too complex and straightforward information with many cases presented with images. Simple pathological findings, such as increased neovascularity, should be easily translated into the dictionary of radiologist as increased perfusion and should be presented with numerous illustrations to enhance experience and knowledge of the interpreter. Therefore, this book will be a very useful and quick reference for primarily radiologists, neuroradiologists, oncologists, radiation oncologists, neurosurgeons, and pathologists. The book also includes the most recent development of the imaging technology, management strategies, and pathological classifications.

In short, as editors and authors, we expected to present this book as a quick reference with brief and important illustrative explanations of brain tumors. The most recent multidiciplinary technical, clinical, molecular, and genetic developments have been also explained with simple explanations and images. We hope that this book will serve as a pleasant, informative, quick, and useful book in clinics of different disciplines which study brain tumors.

The incidence of all brain tumors is reported to be ranged from 4.3 to 18.6 per 100,000 person-years []. Primary brain tumors constitute 5075% of all central nervous system (CNS) tumors whereas secondary brain tumors, majority of which are carcinoma metastases, occur in the remaining 2550%.

Although relatively rare in adults, primary CNS tumors are the most common type of solid tumors in infants and children. Pediatric CNS tumors differ from their adult counterpart with regard to the histological type and site of occurrence. For instance, the majority of the tumors occur in the supratentorial compartment in adults, whereas the infratentorial compartment is the most common site in the pediatric population. Regarding the tumor histology, the most common type encountered in adults is meningioma, followed by glioma, half of which being glioblastoma, and pituitary adenoma. On the other hand, the most common type seen in the pediatric population is glioma, majority of which is pilocytic astrocytoma, and embryonal tumors among which medulloblastoma is the leading type.