November 15, 2010 – Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), a major university hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the first to use Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion in the country. Since July, a multidisciplinary team, including a neurosurgeon, radiation oncologist and medical physicist, has been treating patients for a variety of brain tumors and vascular disorders in the brain.
Gamma Knife radiosurgery, a gentler alternative to traditional brain surgery, delivers up to thousands of low-intensity radiation beams to one or more targets with pinpoint accuracy. Among the indications CHUV physicians have treated so far have been vestibular schwannomas, meningiomas, pituitary adenomas, a glomus jugular tumor and various other benign and vascular disorders of the brain. In the near future, doctors expect to begin treating patients with secondary cancerous brain tumors (metastases), for which Gamma Knife surgery is often the only practical solution.
CHUV treats three to four patients per week during its two weekly radiosurgery days and predicts expanding the service to at least four days, averaging eight patients per week. With 1,400 inpatient beds and more than 8,000 employees, CHUV is an important European medical center and one of five university hospitals in Switzerland. CHUV’s Perfexion is among 40 Gamma Knife systems in Europe.
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