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For treating
conditions that are intercranial or
diseases within the brain itself um there's really no other technology that
can deliver
as accurate a treatment as gamma knife
With Gamma Knife we have the ability to be more precise because
because of the technical features of the treatment
There's a head frame placement
and that acts as a stereotactic coordinate system
we also have many degrees of freedom when we put on the patient headframe when
we are doing the treatment.
one important advantage of Gamma Knife treatment is it takes place in a single
session
there are other radio surgical options such as CyberKnife
that can be used for intracranial conditions
but these treatments typically take place over five sessions
each in the beams in themselves are not damaging however
it's the convergence and then beam centrally which allows for the high-dose
and as a result patients are able to have a definitive treatment dose in a
single treatment
as opposed to the other types of stereotactic radiation which are in
anywhere from three to five treatments. One-way
that people will describe it is if you are
standing in a stadium and 192 people
turn on a flashlight in the very center of the stadium, it is incredibly bright
but the surrounding area is dim and in the
same way, in radiation with gamma knife, there's a head frame
and there's a 192 cobalt sources that are spread out over the head frame
and by utilizing the particular ones that we
need to isolate the area that we're treating were able to
minimize
the risk to the surrounding structures. There's no better technology
for
delivering an effective dose of radiation to the target
safely than the Gamma Knife. Ultimately our goal is to treat people with the least
amount of treatment that they require
and so this is really a much more convenient option that
gets patients back to work back to their lives
sooner