Simulated gamma knife head frame placement for radiosurgical pre-planning.

The Leksell Gamma Knife (GK) is capable of targeting intracranial lesions with a high degree of accuracy. A headframe is rigidly attached to the patient's skull to establish a stereotactic coordinate system and provide a means for precisely positioning the patient in stereotactic space. After stereotactic target localization and radiosurgical treatment planning the skull and headframe are then moved with sub-millimeter precision to bring a target volume to the radiological focus of the GK unit. However, for GK models 4C and earlier, the treatable intracranial volume may be limited by collisions between the skull/headframe and the GK collimator helmet, or by mechanical travel limits of the skull/headframe within the collimator helmet. Both of these treatment-limiting conditions can be found only after the headframe has been placed on the patient. If the volume of interest cannot be treated with the initial headframe placement, additional headframe placements or a different course of treatment are needed. We have developed a software package that allows for simulated headframe placement and collision checks using pre-treatment day image sets, in order to minimize the need for multiple headframe placements. We performed a small validation experiment with an anthropomorphic head phantom to evaluate the software's capabilities for predicting a clinically useable headframe position. We also used the software in an IRB-approved retrospective review for twenty-five GK image sets for a group of patients that could not be treated with the initial headframe placement, to determine if the software tool could locate an optimized headframe position to enable GK radiosurgery of all identified targets with a single headframe placement. We found that four of the cases could have been completed with a single optimized headframe placement and twenty-four of the cases could not be treated with any single headframe placement.