I’m going to be talking about the history of how our department developed a linear accelerator based radiosurgery programme and how we treat with a frameless approach that is very good in paediatrics because, um, there’s no mask over the face, it’s open and a camera system can track the patient’s  motions and avoid the use for putting fixations in the skull.

A lot of the older techniques used skull bone screws to hold the patient in place, very hard to do in kids.

These newer systems are open faced and have no radiation to the patient to allow for positioning so it’s faster and, I think, better.

What impact will this topic have in the advances of oncology?

Historically we didn’t do radiosurgery in kids, it was too difficult to keep them still, to immobilise them under anaesthesia.

They couldn’t co-operate enough. So this allows more and more kids who couldn’t get radiotherapy or radiosurgery to get it because it’s fast, the machines can treat now a whole brain tumour in about one or two minutes versus thirty or forty minutes.

So one or two minutes is very quick and you can also place patients in positionings without giving them extra X-ray dose.

So it’s better, I think, reducing the chance you create a tumour in a kid by giving them X-ray.

Will you like to send a message to the oncology community?

I think to embrace these newer technologies.

Some are expensive, some aren’t and some are just software upgrades to existing machines.

You can have a big leap in technology by adding newer software systems on to an existing hardware machine.

And that’s probably a way to get into this newer technology business.

I think we still need to have a fairly high end machine as a base machine but nowadays lots of software can make it a super-fast machine.

That’s where I think, if we can focus on technology would be my message.