What You May Not Know About CyberKnife Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer — The First Treatment Session

At this moment, the 78-year-old gentleman lies quietly on the treatment couch. The CyberKnife gantry, mounted on its robotic arm, makes precise, incremental adjustments and operates in an orderly sequence. Outside the treatment vault, his 74-year-old wife waits with barely contained anxiety — photographing the treatment in progress and sending updates in real time to their children hundreds of kilometers away.

The thirty-minute session concludes without incident. Dr. Han Liangfu enters the vault immediately alongside the family, helps the elderly patient off the treatment couch, and asks carefully about how he is feeling. When they learn that he experienced no discomfort whatsoever throughout — that he had in fact slept peacefully for the entire half hour — the tension eases visibly from his wife's face. The couple make their way back to the ward together, reassured.

This gentleman is one of Dr. Han Liangfu's prostate cancer patients, and this was his first CyberKnife treatment. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago in his hometown of Meizhou. Due to his advanced age, multiple underlying chronic comorbidities, and a deep fear of conventional surgery, he had deferred any systematic treatment for an entire year — during which time the disease showed slow progression. He subsequently learned online that the precision SBRT technique offered at the oncology center at Chanyi Hospital, Foshan could be used to treat early-stage localized prostate cancer, and traveled a considerable distance to be seen in Dr. Han's clinic.

During the consultation, Dr. Han spent forty minutes in thorough discussion with the patient, his wife, and their children — covering the diagnosis, tumor staging, risk stratification, the recommended treatment plan, and the advantages and limitations of each available modality. Taking the patient's physical condition and personal priorities fully into account, a comprehensive treatment plan was ultimately established: a short course of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) combined with precision CyberKnife radiotherapy.

The team then guided the patient through a sequential series of preparatory steps: two sessions of gold fiducial marker implantation into the prostate, thin-slice contrast-enhanced pelvic MRI, and CT simulation for radiotherapy treatment planning. A individualized, high-precision radiotherapy plan was custom-designed, and the patient officially began a course of five treatment fractions.