Radiosurgery is
surgery using
radiation, that is, the destruction of precisely selected areas of
tissue using
ionizing radiation rather than excision with a blade. Like other forms of
radiation therapy, it is usually used to treat
cancer. Radiosurgery was originally defined by the Swedish neurosurgeon
Lars Leksell as “a single high dose fraction of
radiation,
stereotactically directed to an intracranial region of interest”. In
stereotactic radiosurgery (
SRS), the word
stereotactic refers to a three-dimensional coordinate system that enables accurate correlation of a virtual target seen in the patient's diagnostic images with the actual target position in the patient anatomy.