Quantitative measurement of CyberKnife robotic arm steering

Respiratory motion is a significant and challenging problem for radiation medicine. Without adequate compensation for respiratory motion, it is impossible to deliver highly conformal doses to tumors in the thorax and abdomen. The CyberKnife frameless stereotactic radiosurgery system with Synchrony provides respiratory motion adaptation by monitoring skin motion and dynamically steering the beam to follow the moving tumor. This study quantitatively evaluated this beam steering technology using optical tracking of both the linear accelerator and a ball-cube target. Respiratory motion of the target was simulated using a robotic motion platform and movement patterns recorded from previous CyberKnife patients. Our results show that Synchrony respiratory tracking can achieve sub-millimeter precision when following a moving object.