A man from Greater London has become the 100th person to be treated at the UK’s first CyberKnife® Centre at the Harley Street Clinic in London. The man, who has been suffering from prostate cancer, could not be treated by other forms of radiotherapy. He is among a growing number of patients sent to the private sector for CyberKnife® radiotherapy treatment by their NHS trusts.
The patient’s oncologist, Dr Stephen Karp, said that the unique characteristics of the CyberKnife® system made it an extremely valuable new tool in the treatment of difficult cancers. “For a select sub group of patients CyberKnife® may be the only method able to deliver the appropriate dose of radiation to a tumour. It is absolutely ideal for the close distribution of radiation without damaging surrounding tissue,”
By mapping a tumour three dimensionally prior to treatment, oncologists and physicists calculate the dose of radiation to match the shape, density and position of a tumour. The tumour is then ‘marked’ with tiny particles of gold and during treatment the robot is guided by an ultra sensitive X-ray guidance system allowing the CyberKnife® to compensate for a patient’s breathing and ensuring sub millimetre accuracy. Radiation is delivered from many directions avoiding damage to surrounding tissue and so many tumours that were previously impossible or very difficult to treat, can now be treated by CyberKnife.
The Medical Director of the CyberKnife® Centre at The Harley Street Clinic, is Dr Nick Plowman, one of Europe’s leading authorities in the use of radiosurgery said: “CyberKnife® enables us to deliver more radiation to a tumour than we can with orthodox technology and we are very pleased with the results. Over the past year we have broken new ground and even achieved a world first by treating an intracardiac tumour” – see I Heart CyberKnife.
CyberKnife® is a robotic radiotherapy machine which is able to treat many types of cancer that were previously impossible or difficult to treat with conventional radiotherapy machines. Essentially it is a compact linear accelerator radiotherapy machine mounted on a highly manoeuvrable robotic base which is controlled by a state of the art guidance system. CyberKnife® is more accurate than conventional radiotherapy linear accelerators. It has a special guidance system which moves the robot in parallel with a patient’s breathing, allowing, for the first time, sub millimetre accuracy for the beam of cancer destroying radiation. As a result, the machine can now treat previously untreatable or difficult to treat cancer such as spinal tumours, pancreatic cancer, lung tumours, and many more in every part of the body.
For further information read Dr Andrew Gaya's article CyberKnife® Robotic Radiosurgery.
