tractotomy

A pulmonary tractotomy is a surgical technique to treat a penetrating lung injury.

Subcaudate tractotomy was the most commonly used form of psychosurgery in the UK from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Pulmonary tractotomy is a lung sparing technique.

However, overall patient outcome is the same with pulmonary tractotomy and lung resection; both are viable surgical treatment options.

A few people underwent the standard pre-frontal leucotomy; the most commonly used operation was subcaudate tractotomy.

Limbic leucotomy is a combination of subcaudate tractotomy and anterior cingulotomy.

The operation combines stereotactic subcaudate tractotomy and cingulotomy, with up to 14 cryogenic lesions made in the brain.

Penetrating lung injuries can be treated with a formal lung resection, or with pulmonary tractotomy.

The most common types of psychosurgery in current or recent use are capsulotomy, cingulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy and limbic leucotomy.

Also, pulmonary tractotomy can preserve healthy pulmonary tissue (parenchyma); this naturally is not possible with lung resection.

In the early 2000s in Spain about 24 psychosurgical operations (capsulotomy, cingulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy, and hypothalamotomy) a year were being performed.

In Britain in 1964 Geoffrey Knight developed the subcaudate tractotomy, implanting radioactive seeds in the brain to destroy tissue.

There are four different psychosurgical techniques that have been in common use in recent years: anterior cingulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy, limbic leucotomy and anterior capsulotomy.

There were still a few standard leucotomies, but by the mid-1970s stereotactic subcaudate tractotomy, cingulotomy and stereotactic limbic leucotomy accounted for more than 50 per cent of operations.

In the 1970s the term psychosurgery became more popular as a generic term, with individual operations being named according to the part of the brain in which tissue is destroyed, for example, cingulotomy, capsulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy, amygdalotomy, etc.

The operation was then called stereotactic subcaudate tractotomy and by the mid-1970s, although only used at two neurosurgical units (which by that time had replaced mental hospitals as the sites for psychosurgical operations), it accounted for 30 per cent of operations in the United Kingdom.