Faculty Bibliography

Selecting optimal doses for radiosurgery requires a thorough consideration of existing dose-response data for radiation injury of brain and surrounding structures and of the doseresponse for the desired endpoint (tumor control, obliteration of a vascular malformation, relief of trigeminal neuralgia, etc.). This paper reviews the radiobiological and physics principles that should be considered in dose selection as well as information from retrospective and prospective clinical investigations of radiosurgery.

The role of radiosurgery for cavernous malformations of the brain remains to be fully defined. We have used Gamma Knife radiosurgery for selected patients with symptomatic, hemorrhagic malformations in high-risk brain locations. Indications, techniques, and results are presented.

The effects of radiosurgery on brain tumor tissue remain to be defined. Effects are dose, volume, time, and tumor histology dependent. In this report, we discuss data from resected specimens after radiosurgery, and work to develop a classification method for radiosurgery effects.

The term radiosurgery signifies any kind of application of ionizing radiation energy, in experimental biology or clinical medicine, aiming at the precise and complete destruction of chosen target structures containing healthy and/or pathological cells, without significant concomitant or late radiation damage to adjacent tissues. The goal of this study is to explore the short- and long-term pathophysiological effects of high-dose focused irradiation on neural tissue and its pathologies with histological, electron-microscopical tissue culture and biological-biochemical methods. Radiosurgical pathology focuses its scope and microscope on tissue, cellular, genetic and molecular changes in the human organism and experimental animals, or in cell lines and other in vitro experiments, generated by the ionizing radiation delivered from radiosurgical devices.