Sunway Medical Centre – SunMed, unveiled the one and only Leksell Gamma Knife Icon on the 13th March. SunMed happens to be the first Hospital in ASEAN to have such a powerful and revolutionary tool.

Leksell Gamma Knife Icon

For those who’s wondering what is this Leksell Gamma Knife Icon, here’s what it is. This is a radiation machine that has the capability to treat neurological disorders and brain conditions that normally requires an open surgery. It even has the option for staged and fractioned treatments. An advanced radiation machine like this can help in reducing the complications from surgery and ensure the safety of the patients.

How it cures?

What it does is that the Gamma Knife allows the doctors to precisely target areas within the brain with the help of imaging techniques. This renders a 3D view of the target and the surrounding brain structures. In fact, doctors can now even view larger lesions without any significant complications when a higher dose of radiation is used. This means, doctors can treat it by staging it for few weeks instead of treating in a single dose.

It treats cranial tumors and other functional neurological conditions. The whole system uses 192 precise beams of gamma radiation. This radiation produces a powerful dose of concentrated radiation when it’s converges at the treatment site. On top of that, the Adaptive DoseControl technology ensures that the proper amount of radiation hits the target from every single direction.

With such improvements, it allows doctors to treat patients with sub-millimeter accuracy and shorter treatment times with minimal and usually no damage to the surrounding structures. If you’re wondering what kind of neurological conditions the machine could treat, here’s what it can. Brain Metastases (cancer cells that spreads to the brain from tumors from other organs), arteriovenous malformations (tangling of abnormal and poorly formed blood vessels), facial nerve pain (trigeminal neuralgia), meningioma (tumor), acoustic neuromas, gliomas and pituitary tumors.

A Word from Mr. Lau, Managing Director

Mr. Lau Beng Hong, the Managing Director of Sunway Group Healthcare Services said,

“Exciting advances in cancer treatment are paving the way to better treatments and possibly more cures. However, in spite of this, there remains an urgent need for innovative and effective treatment options for cancer patients in Malaysia. The Gamma Knife Icon™ allows SunMed to provide a treatment that is more reliable and one that is administered with greater accuracy. This treatment method is a game changer, with very little discomfort and lesser radiation dose to the surrounding healthy tissue of the patient.” 

On top of that, he added,

“As part of the vision to be one of the leading medical centres in the ASEAN region, we at SunMed want our patients to have access to leading edge clinical practices and technologies, especially when dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Even patients with serious disorders can be treated with this non-invasive procedure in one day with no overnight hospital stay.”

So far, they’ve successfully treated 37 patients with the help of the Leksell Gamma Knife Icon and I hope the number gets bigger over time. 🙂