About Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery

Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery is a Chinese-language neurosurgical journal based in Guangzhou, in Guangdong Province, China. It carries the international standard serial number ISSN 1009-6604, and its Chinese title, Zhongguo Wei Qinxi Shenjing Waike Zazhi, is the form under which its articles are cited in the international literature. As its name declares, the journal is devoted to a single, sharply defined subject: neurosurgery performed with the least possible injury to the patient — minimally invasive, keyhole and endoscopic techniques for operating on the brain and related structures.

The journal has been in publication since 1996. Its archive reached volume 9 in 2004 and volume 20 in 2015, a sequence that documents steady annual volumes across two decades and places its founding at the very moment when minimally invasive neurosurgery was emerging as a distinct movement in China. Citations of its articles in later international literature — for example, work on neuronavigation-guided surgery published in the journal in 2003 and on percutaneous microcompression for trigeminal neuralgia published in 2010 — confirm a journal in continuous use by practising Chinese neurosurgeons.

A journal founded with its field

The timing of the journal's 1996 launch is central to understanding it. Histories of endoscopic neurosurgery in China divide the field's development into three stages: a cognition and initial stage running from 1964 to 1995, an exploration and maturity stage from 1995 to 2006, and a stage of rapid development and promotion from 2006 onwards. The Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery appeared in 1996, at the opening of the second of those stages — precisely when Chinese neurosurgeons who had encountered the new techniques needed a domestic, specialist, Chinese-language journal in which to report and compare their early experience.

The international background arrived at the same moment. In 1993 Perneczky published work on endoscopic anatomy for neurosurgery, and in 1994 Bauer and Hellwig proposed the concept of minimally invasive endoscopic neurosurgery. In 1996 Wang Xiangchang of Peking University's hospital gave what is regarded as the first Chinese report of clinical endoscope use in neurosurgery, an event treated as the beginning of Chinese endoscopic neurosurgery as a clinical practice. A journal founded in Guangzhou in that same year was therefore not following an established field; it was part of the apparatus by which a new field organised itself in China.

Scope: what minimally invasive neurosurgery means

Minimally invasive neurosurgery is defined by its aim rather than by a single device: to reach and treat a lesion in or around the brain through the smallest, least destructive route that allows the operation to be done safely. Conventional neurosurgery often requires large scalp flaps, wide skull openings and retraction of brain tissue; the minimally invasive philosophy substitutes careful planning, image guidance, narrow corridors and instruments designed for work through small openings, so that the patient recovers faster and uninvolved structures are spared.

A journal devoted to that philosophy covers technique as a subject in its own right. Papers can address how an approach is designed, which patients it suits, what complications it avoids or creates, and how its results compare with open surgery. That technique-centred scope distinguishes this journal from general neurosurgery titles, in which operative approach is usually only one element of a paper among many. Here the approach is the point — and for a generation of Chinese neurosurgeons adopting unfamiliar methods, detailed technique reporting in their own language was the fastest route to safe diffusion.

Keyhole and endoscopic techniques

Two families of technique named in the journal's scope illustrate its contents. Keyhole neurosurgery uses a small skull opening, positioned by precise anatomical planning, through which the surgeon works with a microscope along a narrow corridor; a major review of the application of keyhole microneurosurgery in China, published in the Chinese Medical Journal in 2017 with authors from Guangzhou's Nanfang Hospital among many national centres, documents how thoroughly the approach became established in Chinese practice. Endoscopic neurosurgery instead brings the light source and camera to the target itself, operating through natural passages such as the nose or through small burr holes with direct vision of structures that a microscope cannot see around corners.

The journal's own cited contents show these techniques in use across its history. Its 2003 volume carried work on functional neuronavigation — image-guided localisation — applied to minimally invasive resection of brain tumours, reflecting the marriage of navigation technology with small-approach surgery. Later citations show the journal publishing on percutaneous microballoon compression for trigeminal neuralgia, a needle-based, incision-sparing treatment for facial pain. Together such papers trace the widening definition of minimal invasiveness in Chinese neurosurgery, from smaller craniotomies to procedures that avoid a craniotomy altogether.

Subject areas: haemorrhage, pituitary and skull base

Within its technique-defined scope, the journal's clinical coverage is identified with several disease areas, among them cerebral haemorrhage, pituitary surgery and skull-base surgery. Cerebral haemorrhage — bleeding within the brain, often from hypertension — is a common and devastating emergency in China, and minimally invasive evacuation of haematomas through small openings or endoscopic assistance became one of the most practically important applications of the new techniques, because many such patients are poor candidates for large open operations.

Pituitary and skull-base surgery form the other characteristic territory. Tumours of the pituitary gland sit deep in the centre of the head, directly behind the nasal passages, which makes them the classic target for endoscopic surgery through the nose without any external incision or skull opening. The skull base more broadly — the floor on which the brain rests, crowded with nerves and great vessels — is the region where seeing around corners with an endoscope and approaching through keyhole corridors offers the greatest advantage over conventional routes. A journal that couples these disease areas with its technique coverage is mapping exactly the ground on which minimally invasive neurosurgery first proved itself.

The Guangzhou and Guangdong setting

The journal is published from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong and one of China's principal centres of neurosurgery. The city hosts major neurosurgical departments, including those of Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University and Zhujiang Hospital, whose surgeons appear among the authors of national reviews of keyhole microneurosurgery in China. A specialist journal edited in such a city sits inside a dense clinical community generating exactly the operative experience — in pituitary, skull-base and endoscopic surgery — that the journal exists to publish.

Guangdong's position also gives the journal a regional readership dimension alongside its national one. China's neurosurgical capacity is unevenly distributed, and the spread of minimally invasive techniques from pioneering centres to provincial and prefectural hospitals depended heavily on Chinese-language literature, conferences and training. A Guangzhou-based journal publishing technique papers from leading departments served that diffusion directly, carrying operative detail to surgeons who could not easily attend the pioneering centres in person.

Distinguishing this journal from similar titles

One confusion must be explicitly avoided. The Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery, ISSN 1009-6604, published in Chinese from Guangzhou since 1996, is not the Chinese Neurosurgical Journal. The latter is a separate, English-language, open-access journal published by BioMed Central and Springer with the online ISSN 2057-4967, founded decades later for an international readership. The two titles share a country and a specialty and nothing else: different languages, publishers, ISSNs, founding dates and audiences. Directory records, citations and library catalogues that merge them corrupt the publication history of both.

Similar care applies within China's domestic neurosurgery literature, which includes general neurosurgery journals, journals of stereotactic and functional neurosurgery, and journals of neurosurgical disease research, all publishing in Chinese under related titles. The Minimally Invasive title's claim on a reader's attention is its focus: among Chinese neurosurgical periodicals it is the one whose organising principle is the minimisation of surgical trauma itself, rather than a disease group, an anatomical region or the specialty as a whole.

Readership and professional role

The journal's readers are practising neurosurgeons in China, together with the residents and fellows training in the specialty and the related specialists — neuroanaesthetists, neuroradiologists and neuro-oncologists — whose work intersects with operative practice. For this readership the journal's value is practical. Operative neurosurgery is learned from accumulated, honestly reported experience: case series that state their complications, technique modifications tested across dozens of patients, and comparisons that show where a smaller approach helps and where it does not.

That practical literature also has a standardising function. As minimally invasive techniques spread through Chinese neurosurgery during the rapid-development stage after 2006, a standing journal devoted to them helped define what counted as competent practice — which indications were accepted, which results were expected, and which adjuncts, from neuronavigation to intraoperative monitoring, belonged with which operations. Journals of this kind rarely attract attention outside their specialty, but within it they are part of how a technique becomes a discipline.

Continuity and the archive

The journal's archive supplies the evidence of its continuity: volume 9 in 2004, volume 20 in 2015, and citation of its papers in international reviews and reference lists across the intervening and following years. In a field where journals frequently change title as techniques evolve, the stability of this journal's name and numbering since 1996 is itself informative — the phrase minimally invasive, novel when the journal adopted it, became the standard description of the approach, and the journal's title required no revision.

That archive now doubles as a historical record. A reader following Chinese neurosurgery's path from the first endoscope reports of 1996, through the neuronavigation studies of the early 2000s, to the mature keyhole and endoscopic practice reviewed nationally in 2017, can trace much of the journey through this journal's volumes. Few specialist periodicals are so exactly contemporary with the movement they cover.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed on the verified record, the Chinese Journal of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery is a focused, long-running specialist journal: published in Chinese from Guangzhou since 1996, ISSN 1009-6604, devoted to minimally invasive, keyhole and endoscopic neurosurgery, with recognised coverage of cerebral haemorrhage, pituitary and skull-base surgery. Its founding year places it at the birth of its own field in China, and its archive runs unbroken through the field's exploration, maturity and rapid expansion.

Minimally invasive philosophy is now the default expectation in much of neurosurgery, and new tools — endoscopes of higher resolution, tubular retractors, robotics and ever better navigation — continue to redraw what can be done through small openings. A journal created to argue for that philosophy in 1996 now documents its refinement, and for Chinese neurosurgeons it remains the specialist title whose entire contents are organised around the question its name asks: how to achieve the operation's goal with the least possible harm.