Oncologists use robots to fight cancer

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>> Sumi Das: Last year, 92-year-old Jean Stezel was given a grave diagnosis.

>> Jean Stezel: I was shocked when I discovered I had lung cancer.

>> Sumi Das: Making matters worse, Jean and her husband, Al, were given few options to cure her cancer. Chemotherapy could make her sicker, and surgery to remove the cancerous tumor would be too risky at her age. That's when Dr. Robert Sinha, a radiation oncologist at El Camino Hospital in Silicon Valley, proposed CyberKnife, a non-invasive procedure that Jean would probably be strong enough to handle.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: CyberKnife was a technology to actually eradicate this lung cancer and do it without anesthesia, without cutting her, and with minimal risk to her.

>> Sumi Das: How does it eliminate the tumor? With this robot and super targeted radiation.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: This is a linear accelerator. It produces very high energy photons, six million volt photons that go in and oblate tumors in the body. This linear accelerator is mounted to a robot, and this robot allows us to go anywhere around the patient, to come from hundreds of different angles to target these tumors.

>> Sumi Das: To pinpoint the tumor, the doctors use what are known as collimators.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: There are different sizes, and this is an example of the collimator. So this is a, a very heavy metal alloy that blocks radiation except for that little tiny aperture right there. The robot picks this up, and it's mounted in the robot's head right here, and from various different angles, it'll, it'll shoot different sized beams into the tumor, and those photons are actually going in and destroying the DNA of our target, and it oblates them. When you destroy the DNA of a cell, the cell can't reproduce, and that's what cancer is and a lot of benign tumors want to do.

>> Sumi Das: While the robotic technology may look like a miracle cure for cancer patients, it does have its limitations.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: It's a great procedure when we have a very defined target in the body. However, as is often the case with cancer, cancer's not always localized. So if you, if you target something, but there's cancer elsewhere that you can't see or can't detect on an image, you're not going to cure that cancer.

>> Sumi Das: However, Sinha adds it can be used alongside other therapies like chemotherapy and surgery.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: How you doing?

>> Jean Stezel: OK.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: You look wonderful -

>> Sumi Das: background talk As for Jean and Al Stezel, it turned out to be the best decision. Jean is now cancer free.

>> Jean Stezel: crosstalk And I yelled.

>> Al Stezel: She's back to where she was prior to any of her sickness. She eats good. She walks a quarter of a mile some nice days in the park, and she looks good.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: You getting on that treadmill a little?

>> Jean Stezel: Oh, yeah -

>> Jean Stezel: The other ones you get sick to your stomach, and you lose your hair and all kinds of things, and this was a walk in the park.

>> Al Stezel: You know what? It's a small price to pay for being cured.

>> Sumi Das: For "Smart Planet," -

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: Wonderful.

>> Sumi Das: I'm Sumi Das.

>> Dr. Robert Sinha: So I'm glad to hear that you're getting out, OK.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====