At Kuopio University Hospital, we introduced Finland’s and the Nordic countries’ first and currently the only CyberKnife precision radiotherapy device in 2012. The largest single patient group are prostate cancer patients; their proportion of all the patients treated with the robotic radiotherapy device is over 50 %. Local robotic radiotherapy of prostate cancer robot comprises of five treatment sessions and the treatment period is approximately two weeks. One treatment sessions lasts about 45 minutes. Local precision radiotherapy for prostate cancer is effective and well tolerated.
CyberKnife® is a precision radiation therapy device based on robotic technology, where a linear accelerator is mounted on the robot arm. The treatment beams can be targeted with the CyberKnife device to the desired range with up to less than half a millimetre precision. In addition, the treatment rays can be targeted to the patient freely from different directions, so that we can avoid surrounding healthy tissues effectively. The robot also takes into account the movements of the treatment subject and makes any necessary corrections to the alignment of the treatment. The robot can even “breathe” in rhythm with the patient, in which case, for example, areas in the lungs region, can be treated accurately that move when breathing.
In addition to patients undergoing local prostate cancer and intracranial radiotherapy, we can treat e.g. local lung cancers, individual lymph node metastases, tumours pressing on the spinal cord or liver tumours with the CyberKnife device.