STEREOTACTIC RADIOSURGERY PHYSICAL AND CLINICAL ASPECTS

Abstract

Stereotactic radiotherapy has it's roots both in the continuing efforts towards radiotherapy and stereotactic radiosurgery (Solberg et aL, 1998).

Radiosurgery is a term originally popularized by Leksell (1949) referring to a procedure that delivers three dimensional stereotactic external beam irradiation (Leksell, 1949).

For most techniques a stereotactic frame is fixed to the skull of the patient, providing highly accurate land marks that allows for stereotactic localization of intracranial targets (Verhery et aL, 1995).

Stereotactic radiotherapy with conventional daily fractionation schemes requires a comfortable precisely relocatable non-invasive stereotactic frame (Kooy et al., 1994).

Both CT or MRI are used to define treatment volumes for neoplastic lesions. Appearance of gross tumour in an image study provides the basis for defining target volumes in the frame (Wasserman et a/.,1997).