From Innovation to Evidence: The Middle Age of Stereotactic Body Radiotherapie

What we now conceive of as stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) started in 1991. Ingmar Lax and Henric Blomgren first commenced their intrepid investigations of early liver and lung tumor treatments at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, using a body frame and conceptual origins derived from the work of Lars Leksell, inventor of the Gamma Knife.1 This ambitious underpinning—delivering a very high dose of radiation per fraction, precisely, to a small target, over a short time—was then translated to a frameless setup by Minoru Uematsu at the National Defense Medical Center in Japan—and brought into the clinic in 1994.