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Gamma Knife Facts

Gamma Knife Facts:

The Gamma Knife employs extraordinary, leading-edge technology to perform noninvasive brain surgery: no incision, no pain, and, in most cases, no hospitalization.
The Leksell Gamma Knife has been used worldwide for more than three decades and ensures remarkable benefits for patients who are candidates for the procedure.
Because the Gamma Knife is noninvasive (no “cutting”), the patient is not put to sleep and has almost no risk of infection, bleeding, or other surgical complications.
A patented head frame aims radiation beams with extraordinary accuracy to the lesion or tumor in the patient’s brain. Sophisticated 3D computerization allows the physicians to map the target’s size, shape, and location, and then to calculate the exact gamma ray patterns and dosages unique to each patient.
The Gamma Knife is an option for patients with many conditions such as benign and malignant brain tumors, arteriovenous malformations (AVMs), and many functional disorders such as trigeminal neuralgia and tremors.
The Gamma Knife also provides a treatment option for patient conditions once thought inoperable because of age, medical condition, or location of the abnormality.
The Gamma Knife treatment is generally a one-day, outpatient treatment, including all imaging, planning, treatment, and recovery.
Most patients return to normal activities 24 hours after the procedure.

Background

The Gamma Knife technology was developed by a Swedish neurosurgeon, Dr. Lars Leksell, in 1967 after years of research beginning in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Although a number of neurosurgeons throughout the world were developing their own apparatuses for stereotactic procedures, Dr. Leksell was recognized as the father of stereotactic radiosurgery.

In 1968, the Gamma Knife was installed at the Karolinska Sophiahemmet Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, and in February of that year, a cancer patient suffering from intractable pain became the first patient to be treated.

Over the next few years, there were many “firsts” for the Gamma Knife:

In 1969, the first acoustic neuroma patient was treated, and the first pituitary adenoma followed later that year.
In 1970, the first patient with an arteriovenous malformation was treated.
In 1972, Dr. Leksell founded Elekta, the Swedish company that began manufacturing the Gamma Knife machine.
Treatment of other tumors and vascular malformations soon followed, and in 1974, the first computer-assisted dose planning program was introduced for the Gamma Knife.
In 1976, the first patient with a meningioma was treated.
In 1985, the first custom-made unit was produced for neurosurgical programs in the United Kingdom and Buenos Aires.
In 1987, the first commercially developed Gamma Knife was installed in the United States at the University of Pittsburgh.
In 1989, the first paper on Gamma Knife surgery for cerebral metastasis was published.
In 1990, the Leksell Gamma Plan for dose planning was introduced.
In 1996, image fusion between CT and MRI became available in the Leksell Gamma Plan, and it was then possible to blend images for optimal visualization of the target area.
More than 350,000 patients have been treated (as of 12/05), and more than 2000 articles have been written.