...written by knowledgeable, active practitioners of our specialty and as our field is rapidly progressing, I welcome this upgraded version...In conclusion, this 2nd edition...offers some significant ...improvements over the 1st edition, which was also a very valuable contribution to our neurosurgical literature, and establishes itself as the authoritative atlas of neurosurgical techniques. -- Acta Neurochirugica The second edition of this book, published as a two-volume set, is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the original masterful work that incorporates these advances and addresses virtually all aspects of cranial neurosurgery. -- World Neurosurgery This thoroughly revised and expanded atlas is the ideal reference for residents, fellows, and clinicians to review surgical procedures before entering the OR. The authors provide step-by-step descriptions of techniques, clearly delineating indications and contraindications, goals, operative preparation and anesthesia, and postoperative management. The main focus of this book is on teaching neurosurgical techniques at the most detailed level. Features of the second edition: A new chapter on proton therapy An expanded section covering the latest radiosurgery techniques Nearly 3,000 high-quality images aid rapid comprehension of surgical procedures Online access to more than 100 surgical technique videos This book should be read cover to cover by young practitioners several times during their residency and it will keep more experienced neurosurgeons up-to-date on the latest surgical techniques in the field.
Reflecting the enormous depth and breadth of spine surgery, this volume has been completely updated with current, state-of-the-art surgical methodologies and minimally invasive options. Pathologies ...include degenerative changes, congenital abnormalities, rheumatic diseases, tumors, and trauma. It is beautifully illustrated with more than 1,000 images and includes online access to a video compendium created by master surgeons that provides up-close guidance on a wide array of surgical procedures.
A crucial challenge to successful flare prediction is forecasting periods that transition between "flare-quiet" and "flare-active". Building on earlier studies in this series (Barnes et al. 2016; ...Leka et al. 2019a,b) in which we describe methodology, details, and results of flare forecasting comparison efforts, we focus here on patterns of forecast outcomes (success and failure) over multi-day periods. A novel analysis is developed to evaluate forecasting success in the context of catching the first event of flare-active periods, and conversely, of correctly predicting declining flare activity. We demonstrate these evaluation methods graphically and quantitatively as they provide both quick comparative evaluations and options for detailed analysis. For the testing interval 2016-2017, we determine the relative frequency distribution of two-day dichotomous forecast outcomes for three different event histories (i.e., event/event, no-event/event and event/no-event), and use it to highlight performance differences between forecasting methods. A trend is identified across all forecasting methods that a high/low forecast probability on day-1 remains high/low on day-2 even though flaring activity is transitioning. For M-class and larger flares, we find that explicitly including persistence or prior flare history in computing forecasts helps to improve overall forecast performance. It is also found that using magnetic/modern data leads to improvement in catching the first-event/first-no-event transitions. Finally, 15% of major (i.e., M-class or above) flare days over the testing interval were effectively missed due to a lack of observations from instruments away from the Earth-Sun line.
Solar flares are extremely energetic phenomena in our Solar System. Their impulsive, often drastic radiative increases, in particular at short wavelengths, bring immediate impacts that motivate solar ...physics and space weather research to understand solar flares to the point of being able to forecast them. As data and algorithms improve dramatically, questions must be asked concerning how well the forecasting performs; crucially, we must ask how to rigorously measure performance in order to critically gauge any improvements. Building upon earlier-developed methodology (Barnes et al, 2016, Paper I), international representatives of regional warning centers and research facilities assembled in 2017 at the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Japan to - for the first time - directly compare the performance of operational solar flare forecasting methods. Multiple quantitative evaluation metrics are employed, with focus and discussion on evaluation methodologies given the restrictions of operational forecasting. Numerous methods performed consistently above the "no skill" level, although which method scored top marks is decisively a function of flare event definition and the metric used; there was no single winner. Following in this paper series we ask why the performances differ by examining implementation details (Leka et al. 2019, Paper III), and then we present a novel analysis method to evaluate temporal patterns of forecasting errors in (Park et al. 2019, Paper IV). With these works, this team presents a well-defined and robust methodology for evaluating solar flare forecasting methods in both research and operational frameworks, and today's performance benchmarks against which improvements and new methods may be compared.
A workshop was recently held at Nagoya University (31 October - 02 November 2017), sponsored by the Center for International Collaborative Research, at the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental ...Research, Nagoya University, Japan, to quantitatively compare the performance of today's operational solar flare forecasting facilities. Building upon Paper I of this series (Barnes et al. 2016), in Paper II (Leka et al. 2019) we described the participating methods for this latest comparison effort, the evaluation methodology, and presented quantitative comparisons. In this paper we focus on the behavior and performance of the methods when evaluated in the context of broad implementation differences. Acknowledging the short testing interval available and the small number of methods available, we do find that forecast performance: 1) appears to improve by including persistence or prior flare activity, region evolution, and a human "forecaster in the loop"; 2) is hurt by restricting data to disk-center observations; 3) may benefit from long-term statistics, but mostly when then combined with modern data sources and statistical approaches. These trends are arguably weak and must be viewed with numerous caveats, as discussed both here and in Paper II. Following this present work, we present in Paper IV a novel analysis method to evaluate temporal patterns of forecasting errors of both types (i.e., misses and false alarms; Park et al. 2019). Hence, most importantly, with this series of papers we demonstrate the techniques for facilitating comparisons in the interest of establishing performance-positive methodologies.
