For a couple of years, computer assisted (or: computed aided) surgery (CAS) or computer integrated surgery (CIS) has been used in some medical centres. In the beginning, most of their clinical colleagues smiled at the pioneers of CAS. In the meantime, many international centres applied this modern kind of surgery in their departments. CAS requires an altered form of medical organization. With CAS the time of lonesome heroes in medicine has gone. CAS needs the interdisciplinary collaboration of specialists from surgery, radiology, computer science, technology, and physics. Without the collaboration of these specialists, CAS cannot be successful.
The aim of the congress "Computer Integrated Surgery in the Areas of Head and Spine" (1-7 September 1997, Linz, Austria) was to provide an international forum for interdisciplinary discussion among the different subspecialties. Most of the meetings that had taken place up to now were especially occupied by computer scientists without the attendance of surgeons. The Linz meeting was a relevant success due to the participation of all involved sciences, including the different surgical disciplines. In this special issue of "Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics" you find a selection of excellent papers (presented at this congress) covering important areas of CIS such as neurosurgery and neuronavigation, interventional and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), rapid prototyping technologies as well as advanced visualization techniques.
In his article, "Computer Aided Surgery with Special Focus on Neuronavigation" Reinhard and coworkers give an overview of the history of CAS. Additionally, technical aspects and medical applications are presented in detail. Answering the question, whether CAS should be used now or later the authors state that it is "fully justifiable to start with CAS now".
More specifically, image-guided surgery is described by Kettenbach et al. in "Computer-based Imaging and