Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery
for brain cancers and abnormalities

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:
- Control the tumour
- Relieve any pressure
- Manage symptoms
- Give patients the best quality of life
Internationally proven treatment
- Benign brain tumours usually shrink over 18 months to two years.
- With malignant tumours, a more rapid shrinkage occurs, usually within a few months
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.”