Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), a major university hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland is the first to use Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™ in the country. Since July, a multidisciplinary team, including a neurosurgeon, radiation oncologist and medical physicist, has been treating patients for a variety of brain tumors and vascular disorders in the brain.

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois launches Gamma Knife surgery program

Gamma Knife radiosurgery, a gentler alternative to traditional brain surgery, delivers up to thousands of low-intensity radiation beams to one or more targets with pinpoint accuracy. “Gamma Knife is the accepted gold standard when it comes to radiosurgery in the brain,” says Olof Sandén, Elekta’s Executive Vice President, Europe and AFLAME. “The acquisition of Perfexion by CHUV, together with the center’s extensive radiosurgery experience of CHUV’s Gamma Knife staff, combine to provide the most effective and efficient patient care for serious brain diseases.”

“We are excited about this new Gamma Knife program in Switzerland,” Sandén adds. “It offers patients in the entire region a proven and well documented out-patient procedure to effectively treat these conditions.”

CHUV treats three to four patients per week during its two weekly radiosurgery days and predicts expanding the service to at least four days, averaging eight patients per week.

With 1,400 inpatient beds and more than 8,000 employees, CHUV is an important European medical center and one of five university hospitals in Switzerland. CHUV provides care in all medical and surgical disciplines on inpatient and outpatient bases and plays a leading role in specialty areas, such as burn care, organ transplantation and cardiology.