NIGUARDA HOSPITAL IN MILAN, ITALY, WILL COMMENCE STEREOTACTIC RADIOSURGERY TREATMENTS WITH LEKSELL GAMMA KNIFE® PERFEXION™ FROM ELEKTA
PRESS RELEASE
Stockholm, Sweden, October 10, 2007
In September, Elekta received an order from the highly prestigious Niguarda Hospital for Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™, the latest and most advanced system available for stereotactic radiosurgery. The system will be installed in October and inauguration is planned for mid-November.
Niguarda Hospital is a national point of reference for treatment and health promotion in Italy. Located in the northern part of Milan, it employs over 700 physicians and 1,500 nurses. Annually, over 50,000 patients are admitted at Niguarda where over 20,000 surgical procedures are performed in 32 operating rooms.
The Neurosurgery Department at Niguarda is one of the most esteemed in Italy and one of the national referral centers for the treatment of cerebral vascular arteriovenous malformations (80 cases annually) skull-base tumors (50 cases) and drug-resistant epilepsy (80 cases).
Under the chairmanship of Prof. Massimo Collice, who also is the President of the Italian Neurosurgical Society, the Neurosurgery Department at Niguarda will treat tumors and other brain disorders with Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion, based on protocols and treatment data from the approximately 500,000 patients who have undergone Gamma Knife® surgery since this method came into clinical practice in the 1980s.
“We have evaluated Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion based on the system’s performance at several hospitals around the world, not least in Marseille, France, where our colleagues have more than one year of experience using this new system”, explains Prof. Collice. He continues; “With its unlimited cranial reach, robotic approach and fantastic ability to sculpture the dose to the target, we will get an important addition to our arsenal in the fight against different brain disorders. Besides patients with brain metastases, a large number of patients with cerebral AVMs, skull base tumors and epilepsy will benefit from Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion”.
Gamma Knife surgery has become the world’s most widely used radiosurgery treatment due to its extraordinary accuracy, reduction of excess radiation dose to the body, extensive history and clinical documentation. Unlike other systems, invoking compromises in order to be able to treat the whole body, Leksell Gamma Knife specifically is designed to optimize treatment to the head – a fact appreciated by neurosurgeons and patients alike.
Developed in conjunction with leading neurosurgeons, Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion is:
• Precise – thousands of radiation beams converge with a level of accuracy better than 0.15 mm, leaving nearby healthy tissue undamaged.
• Proven – With almost 50,000 patients treated annually, and thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles, the system has unmatched clinical experience.
• Safe – Unwanted radiation dose to the body is up to 100 times less than that of competing technologies.
“We are honored to receive the assignment to equip Niguarda Hospital with the gold standard for stereotactic radiosurgery and thereby contribute to both better patient care and the advancement of medical science”, comments Massimo Abbiati, Business Unit Manager for Elekta in Italy.
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