Brain & Spine Center CyberKnife - stereotactic radio surgery

Seton Cancer Programs now has access to a new painless treatment—the first of its kind in Central Texas—at the Brain & Spine Center at University Medical Center at Brackenridge. It’s called the CyberKnife System, and it represents a new approach to treating certain tumors.

Our Center now offers a new painless, non-invasive tumor treatment - the first of its kind in Central Texas. Stereotactic radiosurgery has been available for over thirty years with over 100,000 patients receiving treatment. The CyberKnife System represents a new approach, allowing targeting from either bony structures or from implanted fiducial markers.This system can irradiate cancers of the head, neck and spine or lesions anywhere within the body - many of which have been diagnosed inoperable.

How it works

The Brain & Spine Center at UMC Brackenridge has an established reputation for the treatment of complex brain and spinal disorders through the use of innovative technology by a group of dedicated staff and physicians.

CyberKnife is a unique tool that combines an image-guidance system, similar to what is found in high-tech image-guided missiles, that verifies tumor location. The system is able to compensate for both patient and tumor movement by using live radiographic images that correlate with pre-operative images, to determine patient and tumor position repeatedly throughout the procedure. Once the tumor's location has been precisely mapped, the linear accelerator attached to a multi-jointed robotic arm goes to work, delivering multiple, highly-focused beams of radiation from many targeting positions and angles. These beams all intersect within the tumor or lesion, delivering a high dose of radiation with accuracy comparable to other frame-based stereotactic radiosurgery devices, while sparing normal tissue. The CyberKnife system can treat tumors or lesions other devices could not because of it's increased flexibility and the ability to deliver multiple treatments.

Benefits of CyberKnife

Unlike open surgery and alternative treatments, the CyberKnife is primarily an outpatient procedure and takes approximately one to three hours per treatment. Most patients receive one to three treatments total.

Other benefits to the patient include:

• Painless
• No sedation during treatment
• No incisions
• No blood loss
• No recovery time - patient can go home the same day
• Lower risk and fewer complications than open surgery

Dosage distributions adjusted to minimize radiation, sparing normal tissue