Contact: Carol Hall, Marketing Administrator
Phone: 321-952-0898 office
Email: chall@cancercarebrevard.com
Website: www.cancercarebrevard.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 23, 2007
Cancer Care Centers of Brevard unveils new state-of-the-art CyberKnife®
Robotic Radiosurgery System for patients in Brevard and Indian River Counties.
The world’s first and only commercially available radiosurgery system designed
to treat tumors anywhere in the body with sub-millimeter accuracy.
MELBOURNE, FL – The Cancer Care Centers of Brevard started a new era of cancer treatment for patients in Brevard and Indian River Counties with the opening of it’s new CyberKnife® suite on April 10, 2007. This state-of-the-art CyberKnife® Robotic Radiosurgery System is completely painless, noninvasive and is designed to treat tumors anywhere in the body. Giving patients and doctors an option for tumors that were once inoperable or thought to be to surgically complex. This smart system continuously tracks, detects and corrects for tumor and patient movement while delivering treatment with sub-millimeter accuracy, minimizing damage to the surrounding healthy tissue.
The CyberKnife® System was created by Accuray, and uses technology similar to that found on cruise missile guidance systems. The system remains locked on the tumor and compensates for small “real time” movements of either the patient or the tumor. Contrary to its name, CyberKnife® involves no cutting. It is a stereotactic radiosurgery system consisting of a linear accelerator mounted on a movable robotic arm capable of delivering highly focused concentrated doses of radiation to a tumor from multiple positions and angles. These beams intersect within the tumor, allowing for higher doses of radiation to destroy the tumor while avoiding healthy tissue.
With CyberKnife® there is no loss of blood, no incision, no sedation and no recovery time, because it is an outpatient treatment after which the patient can resume normal activities.
CyberKnife® has been cleared by the FDA to treat intracranial as well as extracranial tumors and vascular abnormalities unreachable by standard surgical approaches. CyberKnife® can also be used to treat tumors of the pancreas, lung, liver and prostrate.
There are three stages in the CyberKnife® process: treatment set-up, treatment planning and treatment delivery.
For treatment set-up, the patient wears a simple painless custom mask to minimize movement during treatment and the preliminary CT scan taken to identify the exact size, shape and location of the tumor, along with surrounding healthy structures to be avoided.
Treatment planning begins when the radiation oncologist, sometimes, in collaboration with surgeons decide the parameters for radiation treatment, the radiation dosage and what structures the radiation beams needs to avoid. The dosimetrist takes that information and comes up with a prescription plan to program into the computer software that will instruct the robot how to precisely deliver the radiation.
The physicist’s role is to ensure that the radiation is actually being delivered where it is intended. The CyberKnife® is continuously checked and calibrated during this process. Finally, the radiation therapist actually delivers the radiation plan agreed upon by the radiation oncologist.
For most patients, an average CyberKnife® experience will include one to five treatment sessions of about one hour each. The amount of radiation dosed and the number of sessions given for individual patients is determined by the type of lesion/tumor being treated, the size of the tumor and the nature of the surrounding healthy tissue.
A post-CyberKnife® therapy CT scan or MRI will be performed on the patient within a few weeks to several months following the treatment to measure the effects of the therapy.
“We are so proud to be able to offer this technology to our patients,” said Silas J. Charles, M.D. of the Cancer Care Centers of Brevard. “The CyberKnife will significantly reduce treatment time for patients. For example, with prostate cancer, the traditional treatment duration can be reduced from two months to one or two weeks maximum.”
Carol Hall, Cancer Care Centers of Brevard Administrator said “This is really about the patients. It is about ‘I have a choice’ now in my cancer treatment. We really want to let the patients know that they have a say so in the best treatment for the cancer. It is about hope, choice and making the inoperable, operable.”
Learn more about the Cancer Care Centers of Brevard and CyberKnife® at www.cancercarebrevard.com or call our CyberKnife® info line at: (321) 951-9991.
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