A BRIEF HISTORY OF SRS:
“Stereotactic neurosurgery originated from the pioneering work of Horsley and Clarke, who developed a stereotactic apparatus to study the monkey brain in 1908. Spiegel and Wycis applied this technology to the human brain in 1947, which ultimately lead to the development of multiple stereotactic neurosurgical devices during the 1950s. It was Lars Leksell of Sweden, however, who envisioned stereotactic radiosurgery. Leksell developed the gamma knife to treat intracranial lesions in a noninvasive fashion. His work stimulated worldwide interest and created the field of stereotactic radiosurgery.”
STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SRS:
“Leksell’s idea was early by many, many years, because in order to perform radiosurgery in the way that we understand it today, we had to wait for development of imaging technology to allow us to define tumors within the brain — like computed tomography (CT), an invention of the 1970s, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which came in the 1980s. In the years 1983 and 1984, radiosurgery really started to become available.”
1990-1996 Philips SRS200 Linac system. Utilized a floor stand and isocentric subsystem to achieve high (< 0.3 mm) mechanical accuracy.
This isocentric accuracy is the “gold standard” against which other systems are now judged.
1996-1997: Dedicated radiosurgery linac utilizing Varian and Radionics (XKnife) technology.
1997-present: World’s first Novalis shaped beam radiosurgery system with integrated treatment planning, record-and-verify, delivery.
PIONEERS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SRS:
“In the mid-1980s, the dedicated stereotactic radiosurgical device developed by Lars Leksell, the Gamma Knife®, was in place in only three institutions in the world. The fifth Gamma Knife would not be installed in Pittsburgh until 1987.”
REFERENCES:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19751866
https://www.uclahealth.org/radonc/radiosurgery-history
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5675478/
https://www.itnonline.com/article/recent-developments-srs
https://www.brainlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/patient-positioning-and-monitoring-for-srs.png
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-0-387-71070-9_1