Cranial Base Center

Cranial base surgery has a long history at the University of Pittsburgh. The UPMC Center for Cranial Base Surgery is the oldest in the United States and has helped pioneer both transcranial microscopic and endonasal endoscopic approaches to the skull base and brain. 

Before and since its formal inception in 1987, experts at the UPMC Center for Cranial Base Surgery have continued to lead the field of minimally invasive brain surgery by developing new techniques, tools and procedures that have made it possible to get to masses, some the size of baseballs, and take them out through a nostril.

Our center is now one of the busiest in the world for surgical treatment of tumors of the pituitary region and cranial base. Since 1997, more than 2,000 endonasal surgeries have been performed in adults and children

Paul Gardner, MD, Carl Snyderman, MD, MBA, Juan Fernandez-Miranda, MD, Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, MD, PhD, Eric Wang, MD, and Barry Hirsch, MD, comprise a team of experts in this field, advancing it through clinical outcomes studies, in-depth anatomical study and an international training program.

The concept of team surgery allows our center to select the best surgical approach for each individual patient, tailoring our surgical procedures to the idiosincrasy of the patients and the disease. A full array of transcranial approaches, minimally invasive key-hole approaches, and endonasal endoscopic approaches (EEA) are routinely applied with success to our patients in an individual basis.