Skull Base Surgery

Approaches to the Anterior Skull Base.- Approaches to Central Skull Base.- Approaches to Lateral Skull Base.- Index.

Tony Cheesman trained as an otolaryngologist and his first steps in skull base surgery were taken in the lateral skull base. He realised that the window craniotomy used for access to the floor of the middle fossa could also be used in the anterior fossa. As his other major interest was head and neck malignancies, he started to use the small window craniotomy to access the cribriform plate and the roof of the ethmoid sinuses for those nasal malignancies that breached the skull base. This resulted in dramatic improvements in cure rates and he and his colleagues developed and modified the approaches used for craniofacial resection. This resulted in a well-documented series of craniofacial resections leading to the wide adoption of this approach for nasal tumours encroaching the anterior skull base.He frequently collaborated with neurosurgical colleagues giving him a wide experience of all tumours of the skull base. He was continually active in teaching and with Alan Crockard started the hands-on Skull Base Surgery Course at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He has subsequently lectured and taught Skull Base Surgery worldwide.
He was active in organising this new multidisciplinary specialty. In 1988 he was a founder member of the International Skull Base Society, and this subsequently morphed into the World Federation of Skull Base Societies. As its Honorary Secretary for eight years, he was active in formulating a constitution that was acceptable to the various specialties and resulted in a rotating International Conference every four years.He is proud to be one of the founders of Skull Base Surgery and has encouraged its development as a collaborative multidisciplinary specialty.


Mr Ian Sabin is a Consultant Neurosurgeon based in London. He is the Medical Director of the London Gamma Knife Centre at the Wellington Hospital. Mr Sabin was appointed to his first post as a Consultant Neurosurgeon in 1992 at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, after