10:38 am by Jonathan Lateur
Do you know the “CyberKnife”? Thanks to its precision, this device can attack cancerous tumors which, previously, would have left patients with little chance of recovering. The Sarthe cancer center in Le Mans has just been equipped.
“CyberKnife“ : at first glance, the name can be scary. But on the contrary, it is life-saving equipment : a state-of-the-art robot in the treatment of cancer by radiotherapy, of which the new cancer center in Sarthe has just taken delivery. This is the twenty-fifth operational specimen in France, the one and only in Pays-de-la-Loire. A gem of technology that will allow considerable progress on some patients: “There are patients who may, for example, have lung tumors or brain metastases, who are inoperable patients or who refuse certain therapeutic treatments, to whom we will now be able to offer this alternative. For some of them, we will have up to 80 or 90% efficiency. Patients who would unfortunately have died from the progression of their disease” explains Doctor Yohan Pointreau, who hopes to be able to now treat around 200 to 250 cases per yearwith the ambition to achieve “up to 400 people annually” once things get going, “within a year or two” according to him.
An ultra-precise device, a wide field of application
Another point of interest is the meticulousness of the “CyberKnife” broadens the scope of this new tool far beyond cases of cancer : “Having one tenth of a millimeter precisionit opens up prospects for treatments such as for trigeminal neuralgia, which is a disease that causes excruciating pain on the face: the CyberKnife technique makes it possible to destroy the area of the ganglion that causes these pains without destroying anything else around“ argues Doctor Fabrice Denis, also citing “the possibility for this machine to follow the movements of an element that we want to process” and who will therefore authorize treatment “certain heart diseases, for example, very unpleasant, which generate rhythms at three hundred beats per minute” by tracking down and neutralizing the cause of the problem. “What to attack, therefore, non-cancerous indications, for which we know that we will have a very good efficiency” confirms Professor Denis, hinting, already, the acquisition, by his establishment, of a second “CyberKnife” within three years.
