Improved Gamma Knife for Treating Brain Tumors

A new, completely revised, and fully robotized Gamma Knife expands the treatment reach of radiosurgery, offering a wider range of treatable anatomical structure.

The Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion, designed to optimize treatment to the head and neck area, posses a unique geometric and dosimetric design that robotically administers thousands of beams of low-intensity radiation that converge to deliver a single, therapeutic dose of radiation with pin-point accuracy to the most difficult targets. The optimized design guarantees full backwards compatibility to existing Gamma Knife surgery protocols and methods. A patented collimator design provides a virtually unlimited ability for sculpting the dose distribution, enabling dynamic shaping with absolute accuracy. Shielding levels have been increased ten-fold, and radiation leakage has been reduced to a level that allows windows between the treatment and control rooms.

New sophisticated GammaPlan PFX software controls the system, offering integrated treatment planning and delivery that streamlines the radiosurgery process, allowing treatment of multiple brain lesions in a single automated procedure and a new shot dialog that provides access to both composite shots and dynamic shaping. The client-based treatment planning system can be accessed remotely, providing instant access to all patient data in the online database. To increase the seamless access, the software is now hosted on a personal computer (PC) platform with a Linux operating system. The Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion is a product of Elekta (Stockholm, Sweden).

"Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion has been met with very strong interest from neurosurgeons and radiation oncologists from all over the world and not least in the United States,” said Tomas Puusepp, president and CEO of Elekta. "These current and future Gamma Knife users are impressed with the expanded clinical applications, flexibility, ease of use and workflow enhancement of this revolutionary new system for stereotactic radiosurgery.”

Gamma knife surgery is used to treat brain tumors with a high dose of radiation therapy in one day. The gamma knife device contains 201 cobalt-60 sources of approximately 30 curies each, placed in a circular array in a heavily shielded assembly. The device aims gamma radiation through a target point in the patient's brain. The patient wears a specialized helmet that is surgically fixed to their skull so that the brain tumor remains stationary at target point of the gamma rays. An ablative dose of radiation is thereby sent through the tumor in one treatment session, while surrounding brain tissues are relatively spared. The device was invented by Dr. Lars Leksell, a Swedish neurosurgeon, in 1967 at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden).


Related Links:
Elekta
Karolinska Institute