Experts at Baptist Health celebrate 1,000th Gamma Knife Stereotactic Radiosurgery Treatment

Collaborative teams at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute and Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute deliver Icon Gamma Knife Radiosurgery by using multiple radiation beams to target small, benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous) lesions inside the brain. This treatment can also be used to treat other benign conditions, such as trigeminal neuralgia or arteriovenous malformations in the brain. For more information, visit cancer.baptisthealth.net #CancerTreatment #Radiosurgery #GammaKnife {Transcript} [Rupesh Kotecha, MD] At Miami Cancer Institute, we've been fortunate to have a rapid growth in a lot of our programs in radiation oncology, and the Gamma Knife Radiosurgery Program is just one of those success stories that we've had. Miami Cancer Institute is the only facility in South Florida that offers the latest version of Gamma Knife radiosurgery using the Gamma Knife Icon platform. Not only are we the most experienced in using this latest in technology and have the most patient volume, we are also a dedicated teaching center for this facility and for this treatment approach. We launched the program with the beginning of the Cancer Center in 2017, and to date, we have treated over 1,000 patients. Now, it's not just the number of patients. It's the number of tumors that we actually treated as well, as each patient typically has more than one tumor. We have treated over 4,000 tumors on the Gamma Knife platform. Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery is an advanced radiation treatment option for patients with brain metastases or cancer that has spread to the brain from a different origin or primary site of disease. [Michael McDermott, M.D.] It used to be thought that brain metastases were, you know, a nail in the coffin, so to speak. There's nothing that could be done about it, so the patients just got palliative whole-brain radiation therapy. Now with modern targeted therapies for the primary disease, patients are living longer, and so it's important that we control not only the brain metastasis but the patient's quality of life. [Kotecha] Our 1,000th patient treated with Gamma Knife radiosurgery is actually a healthcare professional herself. She was diagnosed with lung cancer, and after undergoing a treatment course for cancer in the body, had developed cancer in the brain. So when we do whole-brain radiation therapy, we essentially treat the cancer in the brain, but also we treat the rest of the brain tissue itself. With Gamma Knife radiosurgery, the entire paradigm is very different. We're actually just focusing the radiation to treat the cancer itself, and we spare the rest of the brain from unnecessary radiation exposure or dose. When we only treat the cancer, and we spare the brain, we can escalate that dose to be an actual achievable dose that can control disease for an extended or long-term period of time. So a patient would come in one to two days before their Gamma Knife radiosurgery treatment, and they undergo a special MRI scan. Then on the day of the treatment, they would come in, potentially have a frame placed on their head, where they would wear a mask, which is already made for them. We undergo a CT scan, check all of these calculations with our physics team, and then the patient is treated. It could be as short as 20 minutes if a patient has only a single lesion. It could be multiple hours if the patient has numerous lesions throughout the brain. And then the patient is watched in our department We always give somebody something to eat before they leave, and then they're good to go. [McDermott] In March of this year, Miami Cancer Institute will be the only cancer center in the world with every radiosurgery delivery platform available. [Kotecha] Very few centers in the entire world, not only in the country, have the ability to do multi-technology radiation therapy and comparative treatment plans. The machines are next door to one another. So, essentially, for the patient, they're either going to Vault number 1, Vault number 5, Vault number 7, whichever one is personalized for that particular patient. [Group] 1,000 Gamma Knife! [Hospital Employee] Woo!