Anterior Approaches to Thoracic and Thoraco-Lumbar Spine

Anterior surgical approaches have been used for lower cervical, thoracic, and upper lumbar vertebrae since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. Hodgson et al. were the first surgeons to perform spinal fusion with anterior approach for the treatment of a paraplegic patient with Pott’s disease in 1956. Cauchoix and Binet reported access to vertebral corpuses from C7 to T4 using a median sternotomy in 1957. Moreover, in 1969, Perot and Munro described trans-thoracic removal of a thoracic disc causing compression on the spinal cord. Similarly Dwyer et al. described the use of anterior approach for the surgical treatment of scoliosis (1969) and Harrington anteriorly stabilized vertebral fractures due to tumors with methyl methacrylate. First investigators to describe anterior approach with VATS were Mack et al. (1993) (1-4).