Profiles in CyberKnife Treatment: Role of the Medical Physicist

At Philadelphia 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.

Chief Medical Physicist Jun Yang leads the physics team and quality assurance program at our center. Dr. Yang is one of the most experienced CyberKnife physicists in the country. He has managed the treatment plans of more than 2,500 CyberKnife patients during the course of his career.