Seminar Announcement: On the History of the Gamma Knife and Radiosurgery (Valeriy V. Kostyuchenko)

Department of Mathematics and Statistics &

Department of Physics and Engineering Physics

Title: On the History of the Gamma Knife and Radiosurgery

When: Wednesday October 26 2016 @ 3:30 PM

Where: Physics Building Room 103 

Guest Speaker: Valeriy V. Kostyuchenko, Medical Physicist

Gamma Knife Centre, Burdenko Neurosurgery Institute, Moscow, Russia

Abstract: We will discuss two things: Radiosurgery and the Gamma Knife, both of

which have one “father” – an ingenious Swedish neurosurgeon Lars Leksell.

Leksell introduced the term Radiosurgery (RS) rst time in 1951 when he found a way to

make a small destruction deep in the brain without skull trepanation and damaging of

more supercial parts of the brain for functional neurosurgery. To do it, he combined his

own stereotactic apparatus – one of the rst and most popular to this day, and multiple

narrow beams of ionizing radiation. In 1967, the Gamma Knife appeared – the rst dedicated

tool for RS. There are many interesting crossings in this story: for example, we will discuss

why the physicist Börje Larsson started to rear goats, and how in result he developed a

cobalt gamma unit, being absolutely a “proton-man”. We will talk about how this device

remains the “gold standard” in Radiosurgery, even though most other cobalt units in external

beam radiotherapy have become the things of the past.

To understand the Leksell’s idea and its novelty, we must discuss the history of Stereotactic

Neurosurgery, which started in the beginning of the XIX century with Clarke-Horsley’s

works, and continued in the middle of the century by Spiegel and Wycis. We will also briey

discuss why the Canadian neurosurgeon and engineer Aubrey Mussen couldn’t be ahead of

Spiegel and Wycis commonly recognized as inventors of human stereotaxy, even though

Mussen’s apparatus had been developed twenty years earlier.

The second part of the history we must remember began at the same time, starting from

Roentgen’s and Becquerel’s works. It is the history of Radiation Therapy, one of the most

important tools of modern cancer treatment. We will briey discuss the mechanism of radiation

eect on the biological tissues, the connections with tumor genesis, and how RT can

spare normal tissues from damages but kill tumors. We will also talk about the role the

Manhattan project plays here.

We will follow the history of Gamma Knife development and innovations till now, answer

why it is not commonly used for functional neurosurgery as Leksell dreamed, discuss why

the Gamma Knife community believes that Radiosurgery is not Radiotherapy, and try to

give a denition of Radiosurgery.

Finally, we will briey discuss other RS devices, including Linac’s and Cyber Knife, and the

future trends in the eld.