Gamma Knife Radiosurgery
A patients’ guide to Gamma Knife Radiosurgery.
Gamma Knife® radiosurgery enables physicians to treat small areas within the brain without using surgery at all. Treatment is non-invasive, which means instead of opening the skull to remove a lesion or tumor, it uses precise gamma irradiation beams that can treat the tumor or lesion from the outside.
Brain surgery without a single cut
It’s called Gamma Knife, despite not being a knife at all, because it’s so accurate with. 192 tiny beams of gamma irradiation are focused on the exact area of the tumor or lesion. These beams meet at a single spot with the accuracy of less than one-tenth of a millimetre (about the thickness of a sheet of paper). They administer a dose of radiation while minimising radiation exposure to healthy tissue. The non-invasive nature of this treatment may lead to a shorter recovery time than traditional brain surgery.
This level of accuracy means it can target the smallest and most challenging brain tumors or lesions with extreme precision, while safeguarding healthy tissue and organs. Gamma Knife radiosurgery is also referred to as stereotactic radiosurgery and can be used as an alternative to whole brain radiation therapy for multiple brain metastases.
Precision care for the brain
Personalized radiation treatment delivery—without
sacrificing precision and accuracy
New possibilities evolve for more personalized treatments
Leksell Gamma Knife® Icon™ is a fully integrated system to meet the needs of every stage of the workflow.
The Leksell Gamma Knife® Icon™ (LGKI) gives clinicians the option to perform single or fractionated frame-based or frameless radiation therapy treatments, allowing for more individualized delivery without sacrificing precision and accuracy.
High therapeutic dose with maximum precision
Gamma Knife Radiosurgery (GKRS) may be used in place of, or in addition to, traditional brain surgery or whole brain radiation therapy.
During GKRS, up to 192 radiation beams from cobalt-60 sources converge with high accuracy on the target. At the isocenter where the beams merge, the radiation dose is concentrated powerfully at the target, sparing healthy brain tissue.
The target volume and shape determine the number of beams used, and each beam can be individually modulated, further enhancing accuracy.
Stereotactic cone-beam CT
The integrated stereotactic cone-beam CT system verifies the patient position and determines the stereotactic coordinates in 3D, enabling each treatment to be adapted to the patient position.
Online Adaptive DoseControl
Online Adaptive DoseControl confirms the accuracy of the target position and ensures precise treatment delivery prior to every fraction of treatment. Integrated within the LGK control system, it permits clinical decision making during the treatment process.
The automatic dose correction is made possible by the unique design of LGK. Since LGK uses up to 192 noncoplanar beams instead of shaped beams, it is possible to move some or all of the shots to compensate for smaller patient movements. If the patient has shifted, the shots will adapt to this new target position. The online dose evaluation is the last step prior to treatment and gives the physician an opportunity to compare the current plan to be delivered with the original reference plan, and adapt the delivery as required.
Real-time motion management
The High Definition Motion Management system monitors the patient position during treatment, with a resolution of 0.15 mm. If the patient moves outside a preset threshold, beam delivery is automatically interrupted. The result: the highest possible accuracy for both frameless and frame-based treatment.
Each patient and every radiosurgery treatment is unique
Clinical and workflow flexibility for intracranial SRS
Improved efficiency to treat more patients
Advancing new treatment paradigms
Leksell Gamma Knife Icon achieves high accuracy
regardless of the method of immobilization—frame-based
or frameless.
New possibilities evolve for more personalized treatments
Leksell Gamma Knife Icon is a fully integrated system to meet the needs of every stage of the workflow.
Performing ultraprecise radiosurgery
Gamma Knife is the only technology capable of performing ultraprecise radiosurgery, enabling treatment of the most complex and critically located targets. For these types of indications, brain tumor treatment must be optimized along many parameters: accuracy, conformity, selectivity, dose fall-off and integral dose. Only Leksell Gamma Knife can achieve such strict optimization across all parameters at the same time.
Fractionation with highest precision and dose
Gamma Knife Icon enables new methods of immobilization—including the option to fractionate treatment, making the exceptional accuracy and precision of Leksell Gamma Knife radiosurgery a possibility for many more types of cases and many more patients. Icon can be deployed in different treatment regimens and adaptive, mask-based approaches range from single session treatments and hypofractionation to fully fractionated protocols.
” We need Icon to cover all of the patients requiring Gamma Knife treatment. With Icon, we can expand the treatment volumes with Gamma Knife and treat 10 to 20 percent more patients “
Dr Jung Il Lee, Neurosurgeon
Samsung Medical Center, South Korea
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