Surgical removal or debulking is sometimes used to palliate symptoms of the mass effect even if the underlying pathology is not curable.
In the past this effect held additional diagnostic importance since prior to the invention of modern tomographic soft-tissue imaging utilizing MRI or CT it was not possible to directly image many kinds of primary intracranial lesions.
Therefore, in those days, the mass effect of these abnormalities on surrounding structures was sometimes used to indirectly infer the existence of the primary abnormalities themselves, for example by using a cerebral angiography to observe the secondary vascular displacement caused by a subdural hematoma pushing on the brain, or by looking for a distortion caused by a tumor on the normal outline of the ventricles as depicted on a pneumoencephalogram.
These studies were often invasive and uncomfortable for patients and provided only a partial assessment of the primary condition being evaluated.
Nowadays modern diagnostic tools exist which allow physicians to easily locate and visualize all kinds of intracranial lesions without having to rely on indirect effects to make a reliable diagnosis.