Gamma Knife South Africa

Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery

for brain cancers and abnormalities

Gamma Knife surgery

Overview

Gamma Knife South Africa is home to the latest Gamma Knife system which is designed specifically for treating lesions in the brain. The primary goal of Gamma Knife radiosurgery is to control the tumour and prevent future tumour growth.

Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery is successfully used to manage small non-cancerous (benign) and cancerous (malignant) brain tumours, including metastases from other tumours

How Gamma Knife radiosurgery works?

Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery has the greatest precision and accuracy of any radiosurgery system to date. It does not involve incisions (cutting) with a scalpel and because of this, it is termed non-invasive.

Beams of gamma radiation, each emitted from a different location of the Gamma Knife machine, join to focus precisely on the brain tumour. Each radiation beam is not particularly powerful, but the point where all the beams meet receives an intense radiation dose to kill the tumour cells with pinpoint accuracy.

The cells then lose their ability to reproduce. Over time, the brain tumour shrinks.
In some cases, the cells will be killed entirely by the treatment.

The objective of Gamma Knife radiosurgery is to:

Internationally proven treatment

According to www.wakehealth.edu, Gamma Knife radiosurgery has proved to be nearly 90% successful in killing or shrinking brain tumours or stopping their growth. According to www.mayoclinic.org, after Gamma Knife surgery:

According to Veronica Chiang, MD, director of Central Nervous System Radiotherapy at the Gamma Knife Centre at Yale Medicine, “When we first started doing radiosurgery more than a decade ago, patients with metastatic brain tumours were only living six to eight months, on average. Now we’re talking about survival rates in the order of years. To give these patients their best outcome and quality of life, we as physicians must work together in a coordinated fashion to make sure that we use the right treatment at the right time. The use of Gamma Knife has revolutionized our ability to keep patients well neurologically while they maximally benefit from their cancer treatments.”