CyberKnife treatment criteria

Can My Case Be Treated?

Each CyberKnife® centre may adopt slightly different criteria, but the following points are likely to be key.

Number of tumours

Which factors would make my case more or less suitable?

A separate treatment protocol has to be set up for each tumour and each protocol requires a large number of radiation pulses with tracking in between. For this reason most centres will restrict treatment to one or at most a small number of tumours.

Size of tumour

CyberKnife uses very fine, high power radiation beams and is best suited to small tumours.

We give some guidance on the Cancer Treatments page but you should not assume that because you do not see your type on the list that it cannot be treated. More information is available from the manufacturer's web site for patients www.cyberknife.com, where you will find their latest guidance notes.

Characteristics of tumour

Type of tumour

Because CyberKnife delivers high dosages of radiation to narrowly defined targets it is best suited to situations where the tumour is well delineated from the surrounding healthy tissue.

Location of tumour

This is the great strength of CyberKnife - dangerous locations and complex shapes which would bar open surgery may still be open to CyberKnife so this should not deter your enquiry.

What if my tumour is too large for CyberKnife but the location is too dangerous for surgery?

How cases are assessed

CyberKnife treatments

Choose a CyberKnife centre

Each case must be reviewed on its merits but it may be possible to reduce the tumour mass first, by surgery or chemotherapy and then treat the remaining tumour with CyberKnife.

Because CyberKnife is so accurately focussed on the tumour and delivered from such a wide array of angles it can sometimes be used even when you have already had the maximum conventional radiotherapy treatment.

Metastasis before and 4 weeks after treatment.
Click picture to enlarge

It takes longer to treat a large tumour and the radiation exposure to adjacent healthy tissue increases, so centres impose a maximum size. CyberKnife can avoid open surgery in some cases, but the treated matter is not removed. The body can reabsorb small amounts of dead matter but larger tumours may pose problems.

Are there any other options?

MHL aims to bring you the latest in medical advances as centres become available to international patients and we now also offer Proton Therapy (this link will take you to our website MHLclinics.com). Proton therapy centres can cost €200m - €300m to build, so treatment is considerably more expensive than CyberKnife radiosurgery, but proton therapy can sometimes treat tumours that have grown too large for CyberKnife to treat.

Although CyberKnife radiation beams are much finer and more accurate than conventional radiotherapy beams, sound tissue in fornt of and behind the target is still affected by radiation. Proton therapy is a gentle form of radiation treatment where exposure of tissue in front of the target is greatly reduced, a high dose of radiation is deposited accurately within the target and little energy remains to penetrate beyond this. Side effects are reduced and there is less danger of radiation-induced cancer arising later in life.

Ther are few proton therapy centres outside the USA and Japan which accept international patients for a wide range of conditions, but MHL works with the Rinecker Proton Therapy Centre in Munich, Germany ans ProCure Proton Therapy Centers in the USA (Chicago and Oklahoma).

What if I have already had the maximum radiotherapy?

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MHL CyberKnife Service
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