Forty years at the National Centre for Stereotactic Radiosurgery a historical vignette 1985-2025

The first Gamma Knife Stereotactic Radiosurgery treatment in the UK was carried out at the National Centre for Stereotactic Radiosurgery in Sheffield, on a 13-year-old girl with an Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM), which had haemorrhaged twice previously, on the 18th of September 1985. To acknowledge the fortieth anniversary of this historic event, it is timely to look at the department's history and how an experimental treatment with limited validation at the time, came to the UK. What later became the National Centre for Stereotactic Radiosurgery was instrumental in the early development of the technology which is now used as a first line treatment option for many intracranial pathologies in over 360 units around the world and has been used to complete over two million treatments over a wide range of different pathologies (Courtesy of the Leksell Gamma Knife^® Society).