Planning, calibration and collision-avoidance for image-guided radiosurgery

In radiosurgery a moving beam of radiation is used as an ablative surgical instrument to destroy brain tumors. A new camera-guided system capable of tracking patient motion during treatment has been built. The radiation source is moved by a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm. In addition to offering a more cost effective, less invasive, and less painful treatment, the robotic gantry allows for arbitrary spatial motion of the radiation source. Based on this feature we can treat non-spherical lesions with accuracies unachievable with classical radiosurgical systems. The system introduces a new class of radiosurgical procedures, called non-stereotactic, or image-guided radiosurgery. At the heart of these procedures are algorithms for planning both a treatment and the corresponding beam motion, given the geometric description of the tumor shape and relative locations in the particular case