Planning for Image-Guided Radiosurgery

In radiosurgery a moving beam of radiation is used as an ablative surgical instrument to destroy brain tu. roots. Classical radiosurgical systems rely on rigid skeletal fixation of the anatomic region to be treated. This fixation procedure is very pain)ui for the patient and limits radiosur- gical procedures to brain lesions. Furthermore, due to the necessity of rigid fixation, radiosurgical treatment with clas- sical systems cannot be fractionated. A new camera-guided system capable of tracking patient motion during treatment has been built to overcome these problems. The radiation source is moved by a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm. In addition to offering a more cost effective, less invasive, and less painful treatment, the robotic gantry allows for arbitrary spatial motion of the radiation source. Based on this feature we can treat non-spherical lesions with accuracies unachiev- able with classical radiosurgical systems. The system intro- duces a new class of radiosurgicai procedures, called non- stereotactic, or image-guided radiosurgery. At the heart of these procedures are algorithms for planning both a treat- ment and the corresponding beam motion, given the geo- metric description of lesion shapes and relative locations in the particular case.