Philippines Clinic Acquires Elekta’s Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion for Treatment of Patients with Brain Cancer and other Intracranial Disorders

The Philippine Gamma Knife Center increases radiosurgery volume by 60 percent with latest generation Gamma Knife

Manila – Thousands of Filipinos with brain tumors and brain vascular and functional disorders now have access to the gold standard technology for treating these illnesses. The Philippine Gamma Knife Center at Manila’s Cardinal Santos Medical Center recently acquired Elekta’s Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™ stereotactic radiosurgery system, replacing a 14-year-old earlier generation Gamma Knife unit. Physicians treated the first patient, a 66-year-old woman with a brain metastasis, on January 12.

Gamma Knife radiosurgery 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. The Perfexion system, equipped with advanced technology, provides even greater speed and ease of use than previous models, especially for treating multiple metastases.

“The speed of Perfexion has increased our radiosurgery patient volume by about 60 percent in the first month alone,” says Jose C. Herrera, MD, Managing Director of the Philippine Gamma Knife Center. “With Perfexion, we are treating two to three patients per day – finishing our cases by lunchtime. We could treat only 12 to 15 cases per month with the previous system.”

He adds that, with Perfexion, treating multiple metastases (mets) in a single session is now practical.

“We have already treated several patients who have more than a single lesion,” Dr. Herrera notes. “In the last mets case, the patient had five tumors and we finished treating him in about 30 minutes. We would not have attempted treating this many mets in one session with the earlier system – it would have taken hours.”

The Philippine Gamma Knife Center also acquired, and will soon use, the Extend™ System, a solution for expanding the utilization of the Perfexion system. Extend enables the treatment of new indications that were previously untreatable with Gamma Knife radiosurgery. Examples include lesions that are too large or so critically located that not even Gamma Knife conformality is sufficient. For these cases, treating in multiple sessions becomes a new alternative.

“Lesions that are close to sensitive structures such as the optic chiasm would benefit from a multisession radiosurgical approach,” Dr. Herrera says.

He is certain the initial 60 percent increase in patients treated at the Philippine Gamma Knife Center will be sustained far into the future.

“The Philippines’ population is over 100 million people, so there is a great need for radiosurgery in this country,” he says.