Radiosurgery

Radiosurgery is surgery using radiation, the destruction of precisely selected areas of tissue using ionizing radiation rather than excision with a blade, usually to treat cancer as one of several forms of radiation therapy. It was originally defined by the Swedish neurosurgeon Lars Leksell as a single high dose fraction of radiation, stereotactically directed to a region of interest inside the skull. In stereotactic radiosurgery, the word stereotactic refers to a three dimensional coordinate system that allows a target seen on the patient's diagnostic images to be accurately correlated with its actual position in the patient's body; the same technique performed outside the central nervous system may be called stereotactic body radiation therapy or stereotactic ablative radiotherapy.