Cyberknife Radiosurgery – A New Treatment Method for Image-guided, Robotic, High-precision Radiosurgery

Cyberknife Radiosurgery – Overview Cyberknife technology is based on radiosurgical principles that have been in clinical practice for 30 years. Radiosurgery is the precise application of a high (tumour-destructing) dose of radiation in a precisely defined target volume, while protecting the surrounding healthy tissue. During radiosurgery, many radiation beams from different directions intersect in the tumour region, where they accumulate. The surrounding healthy tissue receives only a small amount of the total dose. Until recently, the Gamma Knife system was the standard instrument for neurosurgical applications, and some centres use linear accelerators (linacs) for clinical radiosurgical procedures. These systems, which are used mostly in conventional radiation oncology, have to be readjusted for every radiosurgical treatment. They must also undergo physical testing, because radiosurgical applications demand significantly higher quality and precision requirements than conventional radio-oncological applications. However, Gamma Knife and conventional linacs share the same necessity of applying an invasive stereotactic ring on the patient’s head in order to achieve the desired accuracy of ±1mm. The revolutionary development of the Cyberknife technology, combining integrated image-guided and robotic technology, has led to a paradigm shift in radiosurgery.1,2