Frameless radiosurgery treatment system and method

Abstract

A method and apparatus for selectively and accurately localizing and treating a target within a patient are provided. A three dimensional mapping of a region surrounding the target is coupled to a surgical intervention. Two or more diagnostic beams at a known non-zero angle to one another may pass through the mapping region to produce images of projections within the mapping region in order to accurately localize and treat the target wherein the images are captured using one or more image recorders.

Description

RELATED APPLICATION [0001] This application is a continuation in part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09 / 270,404, filed Mar. 16,1999 entitled “Apparatus and Method for Compensating for Respiratory and Patient Motion During Treatment” which is owned by the same assignee as the present invention and is incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] This invention relates generally to a system and method for treating a patient and in particular to a system and method for controlling a treatment to administer a precise dose to a patient. In more detail, the invention relates to an apparatus and method for performing accurate surgical procedures on a particular target region within a patient utilizing previously obtained reference data indicating the position of the target region with respect to its surrounding which may contain certain reference points. [0003] In order to control a surgical procedure, such as radiosurgery, many different prior techniques have be...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007] Once the diagnostic images are generated, they are compared to the stored 3-D reference data to generate information about the patient and the location of the target region as is known from the Adler patent. At predetermined small time intervals, the diagnostic images are obtained and compared to the reference data. The results of the comparison may be used to adjust the targeting of the treatment beam on the target region to ensure that the dose of the surgical treatment beam remains focused on the target region. This results in a more accurate treatment so that fewer healthy cells and tissue are damaged by the treatment which results in fewer complications following the treatment and permits more aggressive and effective treatments.

[0009] In accordance with a preferred embodiment of the invention, a diagnostic beam device is used and a recording medium is located underneath the patient as described above. In this embodiment, the diagnostic images of the target region, formed by moving the diagnostic beam device, are gated with respect to real-time measurement of involuntary patient motion, such as respiration or pulsation. Thus, in this embodiment, the motion is compensated for as the treatment of the patient occurs and the images acquired by the diagnostic beams are not degraded by the movement of the target region.

Problems solved by technology

Many of the prior techniques are not sufficiently accurate so that healthy tissue surrounding the target region is often unnecessarily irradiated and damaged or killed.

Other techniques are clumsy and cannot be used for particular types of treatments.

The problem is that a frame-based system cannot be used for fractionated treatment in which repeated smaller does are given to the patient over some predetermined period of time, such as a couple of weeks or a month.

Clearly, it is extremely difficult to leave the frame secured to the patient's head for that period of time.

In addition, it is impossible to remove the frame and later reposition the frame in the exact same location for the next treatment.

Thus, the frame based stereotaxy provides the desired accuracy, but cannot be used with various desirable treatment schedules.

The current frameless stereotaxic techniques have some limitations which limit their effectiveness.

First, most surgical operation rooms have limited workspace and the current stereotaxic frameless systems require a large space due to the movement of the robot supporting the surgical radiation beam and the two beam imagers.

Second, the cost of having two beam generators and two imagers is very high making the treatment system very expensive.

Finally, for most current frameless systems, breathing and other patient motion may interfere with the target region identification and tracking due to a degradation of the images.

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