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GEORGE J. COUNELIS: As the Director of the Brain Tumor Neuro-Oncology Program at John Muir Health, I'm committed to treating patients with tumors of the brain and spine.
Our radiosurgery program has been in existence since 2004, and we have the latest technology to be able to treat patients with radiosurgery. Radiosurgery was developed by neurosurgeons, because they felt that treating tumors with radiation should be as accurate and precise as when we operate with microsurgery. The newest generation machine we have is the TrueBeam STx designed specifically for radiosurgery. With this machine we can treat patients with submillimeter accuracy from beginning to end.
One of the groups of patients that I'm particularly committed to are women with breast cancer. These patients are predominantly young. They're active. They want to continue to have an active and healthy life despite the treatments that they have to undergo. This woman had a large tumor in the posterior fossa compressing her brainstem and causing nausea and vomiting. Additionally she had a number of lesions in the left side of her brain affecting her language function.
I removed the large lesion in the posterior fossa to allow her to survive, and decompressed the posterior fossa with microsurgical technique. Subsequently we treated the rest of the lesions with radiosurgery. The next image shows how her brain looks six months after multimodal treatment with microsurgery and radiosurgery. All the lesions in the left side of her brain have melted away, and her function had returned. In this way, we can preserve the quality of life for these patients. [MUSIC PLAYING]
