Cyberknife: A Robotic Treatment for Cancer

There are many cancer treatments nowadays but most of them are rather dangerous to apply to patients as chemotherapy is one of the most destructive treatments that there is for cancer. Other treatments are invasive and include much risk to patient health and safety with the need for operation and cutting the tumor area and to hope for the best.

Cyberknife: A Medical Robot

Then came two revolutionary solutions one of them is the introduction for the CT or MRI in operating rooms to be able to see if the surgery is successful or not before finishing the surgery and this is good and we already took this topic into our account and made two posts about such a great solution for cancer, but wait should cancer be treated by surgery? This answer is no longer a straight yes how is that?

Well, thanks to the cyberknife, though it is called a “Knife” but don’t worry this name is just to add some glamor to the machine but in fact, it is a totally noninvasive technology that uses a robotic radiosurgery system. This system is designed to focus radioactivity to tumor cells only and to exclude healthy cells that are around tumor cells.

This is done with the aid of a high-resolution CT scanner that will take clear images of tumor cells dimension and shape and then will be fed to the cyberknife system with allocating the needed dose to destroy cancer cells. The really interesting thing about this new technology is that it is so precise that at operation time the robot will be doing the surgery without the need of a surgeon as the robot is more precise than the surgeon with the destruction of cancer cells. The system just needs to be fed the data with doses and then the robot executes these instructions with high precision.

A session may take between 30-90 minutes without any need for actual surgery and risk blood loss or infection transfer to the patient. Depending on tumor type and size the number of sessions will be allocated by the patient’s doctor. This is not all, as the most important thing about cyberknife technology is that it is so precise that it can be used in lung cancer treatment that was once one of the most fatal types of cancers as it was hard to locate and remove all tumor/cancer cells in lungs. Moreover, it is capable of treating prostate, brain, liver, pancreas and etc that were once considered untreatable or very hard to treat types of cancer.

This is good news for us biomedical engineers as inventions like these are proof that our role in healthcare can be as important as doctors and this will open a new chapter for synergizing efforts between machines engineers and doctors for the welfare of patients.

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