SRS & SBRT | Stereotactic Radiosurgery and Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy

Known generically as “Cyberknife®” or “ultra-hypofractionation”, this form of radiation delivery compresses the overall treatment time into 1 to 5 sessions WHILE still delivering ultra-high doses of radiation with remarkable high levels of precision.  In fact, if you read about VMAT above, many of ARC’s linear accelerators incorporate multiple VMAT arcs and various “planes of entry” for the arcs, to create these various highly sophisticated beam arrangements.  The word, Stereotactic, or “stereotaxy” comes from the Greek word meaning movement in space. This technique makes use of a three-dimensional coordinate system to locate small targets inside the body in which to perform some action using radiation or surgery.

SRS, or Stereotactic Radiosurgery, refers to a SINGLE treatment and is used primarily to treat cancers or benign lesions in the brain, spine, and central nervous system. Since lesions in the brain are immediately adjacent to very delicate and important nerves and sensitive tissue, this procedure allows the Radiation Oncologists at Advanced Radiation Centers to use “pencil-thin” beams to target lesions using specialized high-precision radio surgical devices to deliver high dose radiation with sub-millimeter accuracy.

Brain and Spine Tumors that are treated with SRS include:

• Astrocytomas
• Glioblastomas (Glioblastoma Muliforme)
• Meningiomas
• Germinomas
• Gliomas
• Metastatic Tumors that have spread to the brain from breast, colorectal, lung or other primary sites.
• Certain benign diseases can be treated with SRS such as Trigeminal Neuralgia, Acoustic Neuromas and Aterio-Venous Malformations

SBRT, or Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy, refers to similar treatments that take 2-5 treatments, and that are not limited to brain or CNS sites.  Also, a non-invasive medical procedure, SBRT is used to treat certain cancers of the prostate, lung, lymph nodes, pancreas and other sites which require high precision and that may border very sensitive tissues with sub-millimeter accuracy.   A few special considerations of when SBRT can be considered:

SBRT (“Cyberknife®”) for Prostate Cancer: Sometimes referred to as “Cyberknife®”, or “ultra-hypofractionation”, ARC uses SBRT to delivery your entire curative course of radiation in only 5 sessions, albeit delivering higher doses in each session.  SBRT in certain cases has been shown in numerous studies to provide equivalent outcomes to more conventional treatment deliveries.  Your radiation oncologist can discuss whether SBRT is an appropriate treatment for your situation.