Intraventricular Cavernous Malformation: Review of the Literature and Report of Three Cases with Neuroendoscopic Resection.

Intraventricular cavernomas (IVCs) are extremely infrequent and only occur in 2.8 to 10% of patients with cerebral cavernomas. We describe three IVC cases and briefly review previously documented IVC cases in PubMed. Among 136 IVC cases, the mean age of the patients was 36.5 years; the male-to-female ratio was 0.8. The most frequent location was the lateral ventricle (52.6%), and most of the clinical symptoms (74%) were related to mass effects on adjacent brain tissues. Intraventricular hemorrhage occurred in 22.9% of cases. Most of the articles concluded that complete surgical resection is the treatment of choice.The microsurgical approach is currently considered the gold standard for IVC resection. Using the neuroendoscope and neuronavigational guidance and based on the biological characteristics of the IVC, proper lesion size, and dilated ventricles, we totally resected the lesion in all three cases. Neuroendoscopy can be considered as an alternative to microsurgery of IVCs. However, we believe a larger series of cases is necessary to demonstrate when microsurgery and when neuroendoscopy should be performed for IVC resection.