Gamma Knife Offers Cutting-Edge Surgery - Without a Knife: Tiny Radioactive Beams Will Make Intricate Brain Surgery Possible Without a Scalpel.
Posted on: Tuesday, 20 June 2006, 12:00 CDT
By Lisa Finneran, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.
Jun. 20--NEWPORT NEWS -- There are no knives in the new gamma knife dedicated at Riverside Regional Medical Center on Monday.
"The knife refers to the knife-like precision of the technology," said Dr. James Lesnick. He is co-medical director of the Radiosurgery Center operated by a partnership between Riverside and the University of Virginia.
Instead, the $3 million "knife" uses 201 tiny radioactive beams to target diseased tissue in the brain that were unreachable with traditional surgeries, Lesnick said. Doctors don't even need to cut into the skull.
"By changing the shape of the beam, the size of the beam, and exposing the patient for longer periods, therefore intensifying the beam, we can eradicate anything in the brain," Lesnick said.
Until now, patients had to travel to either Richmond or Charlottesville - the only other places in the state with the technology - to be treated with a gamma knife, Lesnick said.
"These patients are ill," he said "They don't want to travel away from their families and their physicians."
It's not the only new treatment for cancers planned for the Peninsula. Late last year Hampton University received the final approval needed for a $189 million proton-beam therapy center expected to open in 2008.
Unlike the X-rays used in conventional radiation therapy, proton-beam therapy blasts cancer cells with high doses of radiation while sparing healthy tissue.
HU's center will be built on six acres of land donated by the city. It is expected to treat about 2,000 patients a year from across Virginia and the mid-Atlantic, university officials said last year, and it will focus primarily on prostate cancer, but also will treat patients with breast, lung, eye and pediatric cancers.
Riverside's gamma knife is an alternative to surgery for some patients. For others - those, with, for example, tumors too close to the brain stem or too many tumors for traditional surgery - it's the only choice, Lesnick said.
It also turns what used to be a several-day stay in the hospital into an outpatient procedure done in minutes or hours, he said.
And while most of the current uses focus on brain tumors and vascular problems in the brain, Lesnick said some doctors are researching other uses, including treatments for glaucoma, Parkinson's disease and obsessive compulsive disorder.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.
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Source: Daily Press
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