(SitNews) Anchorage, Alaska - In Alaska's vast expanse of over 586,000 square miles, Anchorage Radiation Therapy Center (ARTC) will be the first Alaskan clinic to offer dedicated brain stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) with its acquisition of Elekta's Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™ system.

Beginning in December 2013, the Anchorage Radiation Therapy Center (ARTC) will start to use Perfexion to treat patients suffering from a variety of malignant and benign brain tumors and functional and vascular brain disorders. With Perfexion, Alaska physicians who want their patients to receive the benefits of brain SRS no longer have to refer them to radiosurgery centers long disances away.

"ARTC currently operates two linear accelerators, one of which is an Elekta Synergy® system, and with these two systems we treat cancer in a variety of anatomical sites. And, we recently added the capability to perform stereotactic body radiotherapy," says Richard Chung, MD, ARTC Medical Director. "The one thing we were lacking was the ability to treat intracranial targets with the highest precision. We believe the addition of Perfexion will be very complementary to the scope of our practice, and help us avoid sending patients out of state."

Among brain SRS technology choices, clinicians at ARTC selected Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion for its speed and gold standard accuracy, and because it's a system dedicated to intracranial targets, Dr. Chung adds.

He predicts that most of ARTC's Perfexion cases will be for metastatic disease, which is cancer that has travelled to the brain from elsewhere in the body. Perfexion, the latest generation Gamma Knife model, provides an enhanced capability to treat multiple brain metastases in a single session. Dr. Chung expects the center will also treat a variety of other indications, including vestibular schwannomas, trigeminal neuralgia, meningiomas and arteriovenous malformations.

Edited by Mary Kauffman, SitNews

Source of News: 

Elekta
www.elekta.com.

Elekta is a human care company pioneering significant innovations and clinical solutions for treating cancer and brain disorders.

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