Pasadena CyberKnife Blog

Unlike open surgery and alternative treatments, the CyberKnife is primarily an outpatient procedure and takes approximately 20 to 90 minutes per treatment.   Patients receive one to five treatments total, whereas conventional radiation is delivered over a course of 7 to 9 weeks.

Patient Benefits:

• Painless
• Sedation Free
• No incisions or blood loss
• No recovery time – patient can go home the same day
• Lower risk and fewer complications than open surgery

Additional Advantages:

• The radiation dose to organs at risk is minimal, even those that are immediately adjacent to the lesion.
• Staged/fractionated radiosurgery for intracranial and head lesions is now possible with CyberKnife
• No head or body frame is required because patient movement is detected and compensated by adaptive beam pointing
• Since no head or body frames are required, CyberKnife treatments can be performed in one to five fractions. This enables the administration of an effective dose of radiation to a lesion while mitigating the injurious effects to critical structures/organs at risk.

CyberKnife has revolutionized the patient’s quality of life:

• Instead of coming in for treatment every day for six to eight weeks, CyberKnife patients only have to come in for one to five days. This shorter treatment course is more convenient and less stressful for patients and their families.
• Since neither incisions nor general anesthesia is required in a CyberKnife procedure, the risk of complications, and therefore recovery time, is dramatically reduced or totally eliminated after a CyberKnife treatment. Patients can even return to work on the same day they had a treatment.