25th Annual North American Skull Base Society Meeting

The 25th Annual Scientific Meeting of the North American Skull Base Society is fast approaching. This silver anniversary meeting will be held February 20-22, 2015 at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. The nearby Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel will serve as the official meeting hotel and is a short 5 minute walk from two and a half days of very exciting science and fellowship.

This years pre-meeting practical course co-organized by Bharat Guthikonda (LSU Shreveport), Lee Zimmer (U of Cincinnati), Eric Moore (Mayo) and Phil Theodosopoulos (UCSF) will be held at the nearby, state of the art Centre for Advanced Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) lab. This year’s course will emphasize the extremely varied skills necessary in skull base surgery. The first day will include cadaveric hands-on trans-nasal endoscopic dissections emphasizing techniques to identify and avoid vascular injury with the afternoon dedicated to temporal bone drilling and the access to the petroclival region. For the first time, the second day of the pre-meeting practical course will be entirely devoted to learning microvascular anastomosis, necessary for cerebral bypass and vascularized free tissue transfers. Participants will be able to perform microanastomoses on live rat vessels to hone their skills.

The theme of this year’s meeting is, “The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts.” The multidisciplinary nature of the NASBS makes it unique among professional scientific organizations. The scientific program this year is meant to emphasize the rich interaction that occurs among the different specialties and how it greatly benefits patients battling difficult skull base pathologies. Siviero Agazzi (USF), Scientific Program Chairman, along with Chris Rassekh, Ian Witterick, Matthew Carlson, George Wanna, Vikram Prabhu and Manuel Ferriera have put together a very exciting program. As in previous years, this year’s meeting promises in-depth discussions via breakfast seminars, expert panel sessions, proffered papers and posters. This year’s honored guests include Harry van Loveren (USF), L. Dade Lunsford (U of Pittsburgh) and Edward R. Laws (Brigham and Women’s). Each of these pioneers has contributed greatly to advancing skull base surgery and has a very unique perspective on the past 25 years. This year’s non-medical keynote speaker will be retired Astronaut Fred Haise who was on Apollo 13 during the aborted attempt to land on the moon. As portrayed in the award-winning movie of the same name, disaster was averted thanks to inspired and dedicated teamwork among the astronauts on the command module Odyssey, and the staff at Mission Control.

We are looking forward to a collegial opening reception on Friday evening and a relaxing cruise on the waters of Tampa Bay with food and drinks Saturday evening; still leaving time for anyone interested in taking the trolley to Ybor City to participate in the night parade! Don’t forget Skull Base Jeopardy – We invite you to submit your team of 3 participants for a chance to be crowned Skull Base Jeopardy champions.