The CyberKnife® Radiosurgery Solution
Inoperable HCC patients
Unfortunately, a majority of patients with HCC will be inoperable for a variety of reasons (2). Though cure is unlikely in these patients, prolonged disease-free survival has also been reported with various radiotherapeutic approaches, with longer disease-free survival periods and occasional apparently cured patients with larger radiation doses (15-17).
Hepatocellular carcinoma may be three dimensionally mapped with reasonable accuracy from radiology studies such CT or MRI (24). This level of radiologic mapping accuracy allows the application of a precise radiation dose sculpting tool such as CyberKnife® to be accomplished in a manner that spares the maximum possible amount of normal liver tissue and other adjacent sensitive tissues, enabling the application of a very high radiation dose that is potentially biologically ablative of the malignancy
In fact, the upper limit of partial liver tolerance to precisely conformal stereotactic radiotherapy has not yet been reached, in a large ongoing multi-institutional prospective dose escalation trial, which has already reached a biologic radiation dose equivalent to the targeted lesions greater than double that achievable with conventional radiotherapy (22,23) |
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 Liver Metastases narrow dose sculpting with CyberKnife®
Image adapted from
"Robotic Radiosurgery" - First Edition |
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