Profiles in CyberKnife Treatment: Role of the Medical Physicist

At Reno CyberKnife, medical physicists play a key role in the patient treatment process, working closely with other members of the treatment team to support imaging, treatment planning and quality assurance testing of our CyberKnife^® technology and its components.

Our physics team develops a customized treatment plan that will deliver the radiation dose prescribed by each patient’s treating radiation oncologist. Using the CyberKnife treatment planning system, the physicist determines the angles and intensities of the CyberKnife’s radiation beams that will be delivered during treatment. This process directs the radiation dose precisely to the three-dimensional shape of the tumor being treated, minimizing radiation exposure to surrounding healthy tissue. When treating areas near critical organs or structures, such as the spinal cord, sparing normal tissue is particularly important.

David Chamberlain is Reno CyberKnife’s medical physicist. He holds a masters degree in biomedical engineering from University of Nevada-Reno and has more than 15 years of experience practicing medical physics. Check back in June for an in-depth profile of David Chamberlain and his work at Reno CyberKnife.