Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Cyberknife
The first time the NHS has this piece of equipment in the UK
The first NHS facility to have a Cyberknife
What is it? It enables us to give stereotactic radiotherapy
Stereotactic radiotherapy means that we can
Fire pencil beams of radiotherapy
To a specific point in 3D space
We can do that accurately by tracking where that space is
We’ve built a very nice room so it’s a calming room
Most of you who have seen radiotherapy before it has a couch for the patient to lie on
This couch moves in six degrees of freedom so it moves sideways
Forwards up-and-down and also has tilts both ways
And that can be controlled from outside the room
The patients going to lie on that couch for anywhere from 45 minutes
Up to perhaps an hour or an hour and 15 minutes so a lot longer than traditional radiotherapy
Where the patients are treated within 5 to 10 minutes
As the patient is going to have to lie on the couch for so long we wanted to make the walls nice and calm
We have some nice back lighting in their
We’ve made a false ceiling with
With a nice typical sunny with a bit of could English day on it
So once the patient’s lying there
The planning is very similar to classic radiotherapy the patient will have had a CT scan
And perhaps some MRI scans
And those will all have been put into a computer system
And then from those CT scans we generated images of where we know that
The patients tumour is within them
When the patients lying on the couch
These units up here are x-ray units
And they will take x-rays at 45 degrees through the patient
Onto
X-ray place in the floor
Images will then come up and we can compare those images with
The images we were expecting to get
And then move the patient move the couch to get them in exactly the right place
And then move the linear accelerator which is just a small bit there
I don’t know if you have seen a normal Linear accelerator it fits most of a room
Attached to the robot and robot is the same sort of robot that spray-paints the Citron Picasso cars
So it’s an industrial robot
So once the patients lying there we can then treat them
And get down to millimetre accuracy
The CyberKnife will also allow us to take research forward
This is the first in the NHS there are 2 in the private sector
The private-sector has a different ethos about taking research forward
And we're very pleased that this year we joined a research partnership with
The Royal Marsden hospital
For cancer research
They’re likely to be the second NHS hospital to put in this machine
Again raised through charitable funds
Not through NHS resource
This should make us a very big research organisation With a catchment area of over four and a half million people
Meaning we can take the use of this equipment forward and prove its worth
So what’s our remaining hurdles
Paid for this out of charitable money
But we do need to generate an income to run the system just like anything else
And that's a bit this big slightly frustrating at the moment but we're working
With our commissioners to explain why this needs to be funded
And hopefully that succeeds and we will be more positive. If it doesn’t then we will spray cars