Commentary

The paper conducted by Ding and Furneaux[1] is of high interest and shows great feasibility of the given approach. Personally, I used the transcortical approach to the third ventricle through the foramen of Monro. When patients had an external ventricular drainage, we followed route of the drainage and used two retractors along the drainage canal. The approach to the third ventricle takes us about 3 min in such cases. Despite fears of postsurgical seizures and increasing risk of intracerebral bleeding such a risk could not be seen in 33 patients, which were evaluated retrospectively (data not published). The transcortical approach keeps away the fornices and the internal cerebral vein and in my opinion, is a safe and highly efficient approach.