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More than 11 million people are diagnosed with some form of cancer every year.
And the one that claims the most lives is lung cancer.
In the United States it surpassed breast cancer
as the leading cause of death in women.
Here in this Washington Hospital, they're giving
new hope to sufferers with this deadly disease.
They've got a way of removing the cancerous lumps without surgery.
Instead, they blast them out of existence with a
beam of radiation delivered by a highly intelligent robot arm.
This is the CyberKnife. It's actually the latest
development in image-guided radio surgery.
There's not a surgeon, a scrub nurse, or a scalpel in sight.
More importantly, it's helping patients like Joan
Schwab avoid painful surgery.
In the last year, Joan had cancerous tumors removed from both lungs.
The first was removed with conventional surgery.
It's not an easy surgery at all.
It's something I wouldn't wish on anyone else, now. Is it painful?
It is, very painful. Joan's second tumor was
removed using the CyberKnife. Wow, no comparison.
There's not, there's not a comparison at all. Just wonderful.
You just walk away and you do that for 3 times.
And that's what makes it, that's a lot easier than having surgery.
Now here's why this machine is so incredible. Think about it.
When the patient's lying down, they are breathing
of course, and as their lungs go in and out, that cancer lump is moving.
So the radiation beam has to hit a moving target.
Well amazingly, this clever robot arm can actually do that.
It works by recording the breathing movements of a patient's chest.
It combines that information with x-ray pictures of
the skeletal reference points, or tiny metal
markers physically implanted into the borders of the tumor.
This allows precise delivery of radiation during any
point in the respiratory cycle.
Pin- point accuracy means there's much less chance of damaging healthy tissue.
It also means the radiation doses can be much stronger
giving a result that would normally only be achieved with radical surgery.
Okay, these are the, ah, patient's films that I wanted to show you.
Dr. Brian Collins is an Oncology Radiologist at
Georgetown University Hospital where more than
250 patients have been treated with the CyberKnife.
So, so that was the cancer lump before the treatment with the CyberKnife.
That's correct. And after the treatment, which scan is that?
The scan at that point is this one. It's gone.
The lump is completely gone. Completely gone.
So, if, if you can catch the cancer early enough,
you could actually remove the tumor with no operation
at all, just using the CyberKnife.
In the future, that will be feasible.
Most patients require between 2 and 5 sessions with the CyberKnife.
Joan needed 3 for her tumor and suffered virtually no discomfort at all.
Like I said, the first time is frightening, okay.
But, after that you kind of relax and you look up and you can see up there.
They give you something to relax you a little
because 2 hours is a long time to be laying down flat.
The CyberKnife has been used to treat about 10,000
patients in the US, Japan, and parts of Europe.
While it's not suitable for all cases, Joan now
has a lot to look forward to, including meeting her
new granddaughter for the first time.
I plan to live a long time, and be able to walk around,
you know, and that CyberKnife was, was, really
what helped me the most I think in the very, very end.
It gave me; it gave me a new lease on life.