PARIS, May 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Groupe Hospitalier Pitie
Salpetriere, a world-renowned teaching hospital, and among Europe’s
largest medical centers has continued its long tradition of
excellence in neurosciences and its expertise in radiation therapy
with the acquisition of Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™.
On October 25, 2010, clinicians used Perfexion – Paris’s
first and only dedicated radiosurgery system – to treat
Salpetriere’s first patient, a 55-year-old woman with a brain
metastasis.
“Her Gamma Knife® surgery went very well and her follow up
examination in February showed she is doing well post-operatively,”
says Charles Ambroise Valery, M.D., a neurosurgeon and head of the
radiosurgery department at 1,600-bed Salpetriere. “Perfexion will
have a huge impact due to our large population and the incidence of
cerebral pathologies that can be treated with radiosurgery.
Neurosurgeons have confidence in Gamma Knife, and particularly in
Perfexion because it is designed as a dedicated specialist tool for
intracranial brain diseases in contrast with other radiosurgery
systems. In two or three years, I predict we could treat 700
patients per year.”
Gamma Knife surgery is a gentler alternative to traditional
brain surgery for illnesses such as metastatic disease –
cancer that has traveled to the brain from elsewhere in the body.
The system precisely delivers up to thousands of low-intensity
radiation beams to one or more targets in a single session.
Perfexion provides even greater speed and ease of use than previous
models, especially for treating multiple metastases.
Solution for multiple brain metastases
Since October, Salpetriere has treated about 177 patients
presenting 375 lesions, of which about 75 percent were patients
with brain metastases.
Since 2005, Salpetriere had been using a linac-based system
equipped with “micro multi-leaf” beam shaping technology to treat
patients with
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