Healthcare Industry News: Perfexion
News Release - November 6, 2006
Elekta to Deliver Four Leksell Gamma Knife(R) Perfexion(TM) to Customers of American Shared Hospital Services' Gamma Knife Financing Unit
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Nov. 6 (HSMN NewsFeed) -- Elekta announced today that it has received an order for four (4) Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion(TM) with deliveries starting in the spring of 2007 to customers of GK Financing, LLC, a unit of American Shared Hospital Services' (Amex: AMS ).Through GK Financing, American Shared Hospital Services (AMS) is the world leader in providing Gamma Knife® surgery services, with Leksell Gamma Knife units installed at 21 U.S. sites. GK Financing is majority owned (81 percent) by AMS, and the remaining 19 percent owned by Elekta.
Currently installed and in clinical operation at Hopital la Timone (Timone University Hospital) in Marseille, France, the first patients were successfully treated with Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion in mid-July. In a report on the first 30 patients treated with the new system presented at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, in October, the team in Marseille concluded, "In this preliminary experience, Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion is turning out to represent a great improvement over other radiosurgical technologies and even over earlier Gamma Knife systems. Our overall feeling is that this new generation platform for radiosurgery is a real quantum leap for radiosurgery technology and appears to make radiosurgery even easier, faster and safer than before."
Ernest A. Bates, M.D., Chairman and CEO of American Shared Hospital Services, said, "With Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion, Elekta expands the Gamma Knife product line with a completely new system that takes stereotactic radiosurgery to the next level and provides a platform for further refinement and expansion of radiosurgery procedures in the brain, skull, cervical spine and head & neck regions. By making non-invasive brain surgery more straightforward than ever before, this new system offers important benefits to brain disorder patients. What is more, the positive reports from Professor Jean Regis and his team in Marseille suggest that Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion will support increased patient volumes while at the same time improving efficiency and saving physician time."
"We are pleased to expand our collaboration with AMS by delivering these systems to its customers, who will be among the very first in the world to have Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion installed. The formal U.S. launch of Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion at the CNS meeting generated strong interest in this system from U.S. neurosurgeons as well as from their colleagues all over the world," commented Tomas Puusepp, President and CEO of Elekta.
About Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion
Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion maintains the full clinical compatibility with the classic Leksell Gamma Knife and is supported by the efficacy and outcome data of 400,000 treated patients worldwide and thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles, making it the most proven method for radiosurgery of the brain.
Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion allows for a dramatically increased treatable volume, which is estimated to increase the number of patients that can benefit from Gamma Knife surgery by up to 40%. The fully automated and efficient single push-button approach is expected to save 3-5 working weeks of physician time per year at an average Gamma Knife center.
Designed from the ground up with patient safety and staff comfort in mind, the Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion reduces unwanted body dose to patients by as much as 100 times compared with competing technologies, which is particularly important for the treatment of children and women of childbearing age.
About American Shared Hospital Services
American Shared Hospital Services provides turnkey technology solutions for advanced radiosurgical and radiation therapy services. AMS is the world leader in providing Gamma Knife radiosurgery services, a non-invasive treatment for malignant and benign brain tumors, vascular malformations and trigeminal neuralgia (facial pain). The Company also offers the latest IGRT and IMRT systems, as well as its proprietary Operating Room for the 21st Century (OR21®) concept. Through its equity investment in Still River Systems, AMS also plans to complement these services with the Clinatron- 250(TM) proton beam radiation therapy (PBRT) system, which has not yet been approved by the FDA. For more information about AMS, please visit http://www.ashs.com.
About Elekta
Elekta is an international medical-technology Group, providing meaningful clinical solutions, comprehensive information systems and services for improved cancer care and management of brain disorders. All of Elekta's solutions employ non-invasive or minimally invasive techniques and are therefore clinically effective, gentle on the patient and cost-effective.
Clinical solutions include among others Leksell Gamma Knife® for non-invasive treatment of brain disorders and Elekta Synergy® for image guided radiation therapy (IGRT). Following the acquisition of IMPAC Medical Systems Inc. in April 2005, the Elekta Group is the world's largest supplier of oncology software.
Elekta's systems and solutions are used at over 4,000 hospitals around the world to treat cancer and manage clinical operations as well as to diagnose and treat brain disorders, including tumors, vascular malformations and functional disorders.
With approx. 2,000 employees, Elekta's corporate headquarter is located in Stockholm, Sweden and the company is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange under the ticker EKTAb. For more information about Elekta, please visit http://www.elekta.com.
Source: Elekta
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