Dr. Gary Steinberg

And this is something that I really tried to push when I was chair of the department for 25 years at Stanford.

So minimally invasive techniques include operating through the vessels.

Right, so now my, I don't do this myself, but my colleagues, some of whom are neurosurgeons, some are interventional radiologists, they can go through the groin in the femoral artery or through the radial artery.

They can thread a catheter backwards.

Into the brain.

From the groin, they can go up

into the aorta, then up into the carotid artery.

From there, they can go up into the brain arteries, the middle cerebral artery, and they can treat some of the hemorrhagic problems like aneurysms by deploying thrombogenic coils there or new devices.

They can pull clots out if there's an acute stroke from a clot in an artery in the brain.

It's really quite impressive.

Then we and others have developed techniques to use focus radiation.

On the brain.

And that's called radiosurgery.

So examples of that are Gamma Knife.

Cyber Knife was invented at Stanford by one of my colleagues, actually.

And this uses beams of radiation.

Gamma Knife uses a cobalt source, multiple sources of cobalt.

The CyberKnife uses X-rays.

When I started, I was very involved with using cyclotron generated heavy particles like helium and proton, and they can be focused.

And the advantage of this is you don't have to open the skull.