Neurosurgical and radiosurgical decision making in brain metastasis patients in the area of targeted therapies?

The incidence of brain metastases (BM) is increasing to date, mostly due to the actual improvement of cancer patient overall survival (OS) with the advent of targeted therapies. BM management has dramatically evolved over the last 15 years and uses varying strategies including more or less aggressive local treatments, sometimes combined with systemic therapies that led to an improvement of patient's survival and quality of life. The therapeutic decision is still a matter of debates among experts during multidisciplinary staff, taking into account established prognostic factors including patient's general condition (clinical and functional status of the patient), extra-cerebral disease status, characteristic of intracranial metastases and clinical and radiological presentation of BM. In this article, we reviewed evidence based data available in the literature on the local treatment of BM.