see [[brain retractor]].

Brain retraction is required for adequate exposure during many intracranial procedures. The incidence of contusion or infarction from overzealous brain retraction is probably 10% in cranial base procedures and 5% in intracranial aneurysm procedures. The literature on brain retraction injury is reviewed, with particular attention to the use of intermittent retraction. Intraoperative monitoring techniques--brain electrical activity, cerebral blood flow, and brain retraction pressure--are evaluated. Various intraoperative interventions--anesthetic agents, positioning, cerebrospinal fluid drainage, operative approaches involving bone resection or osteotomy, hyperventilation, induced hypotension, induced hypertension, mannitol, and nimodipine--are assessed with regard to their effects on brain retraction. Because brain retraction injury, like other forms of focal cerebral ischemia, is multifactorial in its origins, a multifaceted approach probably will be most advantageous in minimizing retraction injury. Recommendations for operative management of cases involving significant brain retraction are made. These recommendations optimize the following goals: anesthesia and metabolic depression, improvement in cerebral blood flow and calcium channel blockade, intraoperative monitoring, and operative exposure and retraction efficacy. Through a combination of judicious retraction, appropriate anesthetic and pharmacological management, and aggressive intraoperative monitoring, brain retraction should become a much less common source of morbidity in the future
((Andrews RJ, Bringas JR. A review of brain retraction and recommendations for minimizing intraoperative brain injury. Neurosurgery. 1993 Dec;33(6):1052-63; discussion 1063-4. doi: 10.1227/00006123-199312000-00014. PMID: 8133991.)).