Editorial and Acknowledgment

We are pleased to publish the long awaited first version of the guidelines for endoscopic spinal surgery on behalf of the International Society for Minimal Intervention in Spinal Surgery (ISMISS). Our feature article is “Guidelines for Endoscopic Spinal Surgery” Issue 1, authored by C. Birkenmaier, J. Chiu, A. Fontanella & H. Leu for ISMISS.

As per Professor Christof Birkenmaier, in the past several years a large number of different endoscopic operative procedures have been developed for, and introduced into the clinical setting; therefore a need arose to offer our ISMISS members some guidelines for the clinical practice of spinal endoscopy along with a list of references on clinically proven procedures. The ISMISS Board of Directors collaborated on a support and back-up document on methodical questions that may be raised in our practices regarding state of the art endoscopic spinal surgery.

It is our great pleasure to publish for our members and other interested practitioners in the field of minimally invasive spinal surgery our first edition of “Guidelines for Endoscopic Spinal Surgery.” We welcome critical and technical input for consideration in periodic reviews of these guidelines and thank you all in advance for your contributions. For feedback and input please contact Professor Birkenmaier, MD via email at doctor-b@web.de.

We appreciate the contribution of select abstracts from International 26th Course for Percutaneous Endoscopic Spinal Surgery and Complementary Minimal Invasive Techniques, Zurich, Switzerland – 2008 with permission from Dr. Hansjoerg Leu and ISMISS.

For reviewing and editing this issue and preparing the final version, we are grateful to the representatives from various MISS societies, and the IJMIST Editorial Board, especially Hansjoerg Leu, Christof Birkenmaier, A. Fontanella, Merrill Reuter, and Charles Ray.

Thank you for participating in this IJMIST! We welcome your comments and invite you to submit your manuscripts, global news, and future meeting announcements for future publications!

John C. Chiu, M.D., FRCS, D.Sc. President, ISMISS