The Novalis Tx is a powerful radiotherapy system that offers a versatile combination of advanced technologies for the treatment of tumors and other anatomical targets. The Novalis Tx features a high dose delivery rate, with dynamic beam shaping, and frameless patient positioning with three imaging modalities for pinpointing the tumor and positioning the patient with high precision. The Novalis Tx allows multiple beam of radiation with varying strength to be delivered into the brain or body for treating deep-seated tumors with the goal of sparing healthy tissue that resides close to the tumor. The Novalis Tx offers a wide range of treatment options for a variety of conditions including malignant and benign tumors in the head and body. When the RapidArc delivery system from Varian Medical Systems is paired with the Novalis Tx technology, the treatment times are significantly shortened for patients while improving the target dose conformity to the tumor. RapidArc allows the Novalis Tx to deliver its treatments two to eight times faster than other Linac systems existing today while maintaining precision.

Tomo-Therapy is a term in combination of ‘Tomo’, meaning a layer of an object, and ’therapy’, meaning treatment, and is a therapeutic medical instrument for intensity modulated radiation therapy combining the previous Linear Accelerator and CT. Various organs and the tumor are shown in 3D images and the tumor is divided into numerous monolayers with several images of the tumor by a certain thickness with the installed CT, and thousands of small radiations per each monolayer are irradiated only on the tumor while rotating 360 degrees. It is the latest tailored radiotherapy which allows intensity modulation, image induction and radiosurgery.

The da Vinci Robotic Surgical System is a robotic surgical system with precision which enables to perform a previously impossible surgery by significantly decreasing an incident of bleeding and pain while decreasing the previously inevitable damage to the vessel or nerve by allowing the operator to view the affected area by 10~15x through a 3D image.As a high-tech robotic surgical system which replaces the most of a laparoscopic surgery, the da Vinci is a robot that is directly inserted inside the body to perform a surgery while it moves like the hand of the operator to open the affected area as if it is done directly by the operator. It enables to perform the previously very difficult or impossible surgery by transmitting the enlarged 3D image by 10~15x without twists to the operator and conveying delicate movements of the operator to the 5~8mm small robot arm. The da Vinci system is already in wide use of nearly every excellent university hospitals and training hospitals in the United States and Europe. With the da Vinci Robotic Surgery, it is possible to return to social activities immediately to more than daily life because bleeding and pain are far less frequent, and thanks to a speedy recovery after the surgery with da Vinci compared to the previous surgery. In addition, it could reduce the previously inevitable damage to the vessel or nerve since it is possible to perform a delicate surgery using a robotic tool just like the hand of a human while viewing the enlarged screen by 10~15x.

MAGNETOM Skyra 3.0T by Siemens is the MRI equipment with highly improved performance, which is recently introduced at CNUHH. It has presented the new standard for efficacy and service with installation of the latest technology and Dot engine through Tim 4G, the 4th generation Tim technology, to maximize the previous MRI performance, and is expectedto highly improve stability in patient examinations. By realizing a more delicate and prompt test and an image with high resolution with the 3 Tesla, twice as much as 1.5 Tesla, the magnetic field for the previous MRI that is currently used in over 50% of domestic hospitals, it is a very efficient equipment in diseases requiring precise diagnosis such as diseases affecting the brain, blood vessels, and the heart. In addition, it increased compatibility with installation of the test coils per area, which were supplied from the outside manufacturing, now by the self-development of Siemens.

CNUHH started treatment with the installation of ‘SOMATOM Definition Flash,’ the latest CT by Siemens of Germany in December 2010. This equipment presents the best shooting speed and the minimum radiation dose from the innovative technology called Flash Spiral, which is applied with the upgraded Dual Source and Dual Energy technology. It has not onlythe fastest examination speed among the latest CT scanners, but it can also conduct an accurate CT scan with only a small amount of radiation exposure by using the software to radically decrease the radiation dose, which has pointed out as a problem of CT scanners. Especially, for cardiac imaging tests, it could be used in the assessment of pre-operative cardiac diseases in more than a physical examination without concern of radiation exposure since images could be obtained by exposure to radiation decreased by 95% at maximum compared to radiation exposure with the previous CT.

With the opening of the Cancer Center at CNUHH, the latest 3D and 4D Conformal Therapy has become possible at the Department of Radiation Oncology. With the introduction of the Linear Accelerator (term for an external radiotherapy tool) installed with 80~120 MLCs (multileaf collimator), it was possible to select various shapes of therapeutic portalimages from various angles. The therapy called 3-Dimensional Conformal Radiation Therapy (3-DCRT) is a radiotherapy method to irradiate radiation selectively only at the cancer site without damaging the normal tissue of our body. Recently, Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) is developed and used. With the conventional radiotherapy, it was impossible for radiotherapy with high dose on the tumor surrounding the normal tissue, but with IMRT, it could overcome the radiation sequelae and disorder by allowing the radiation therapy only on the tumor while minimizing the radiation dose on the normal tissue.

The Gamma Knife that has realized the dream of a bloodless brain surgery is a new medical revolution from a fabulous mix of advanced technology and medicine. Developed by Professor Leksell of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Karoliska University Hospital of Sweden, the Gamma Knife, without the need of general anesthesia, safely and conveniently treats various brain tumors and Cerebrovascular diseases and other diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease, trigeminal neuralgia, epilepsy, and skull base tumor which is very difficult to operate due to the high risk of complications while not performing a scalp incision. There are no side effects such as infection or post-operative damage to the brain tissue and scars involving the Gamma Knife Perfexion since there is no bleeding or transfusion accompanied with skin incision, and there are also no side effects or complications from general anesthesia so it is a very safe high-tech medical equipment for treatment of brain diseases with its proven excellent performance in the United States, Europe, Japan etc.

It is applied with the Navigation that locates a vessel or vehicle using a satellite to brain surgery, and it is the latest high-tech surgical tool to eliminate a lesion while minimizing the damage to the nerve or vessel by real-time viewing of the site of a lesion during brain surgery. The Brain & Spinal Cord Tumor Clinic at CNUHH has performed the largest number of surgeries; about 3000 cases in brain tumor patients since the first introduction of the brain navigation system (VectorVision 2) in Korea in 2000, and ungraded to the latest model, the StealthStation S7 system, in 2012. With the newly introduced StealthStation S7 system, it is possible to perform more delicate surgeries since it allows during the surgery to use a special image which was taken before the surgery, and also in connection with the latest operating microscope unlike the previous navigation system in which only a simple image could be used.

PET/CT is a medical imaging device which combines both a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner and a computed tomography (CT) scanner, so that metabolic or biochemical activity in the body can be visualized more effectively through the correlation of functional information obtained by PET and anatomic information obtained by CT scanning. For the evaluation of metabolic activity, radiopharmaceuticals that emit positron are administered intravenously and then imaging is acquired on PET/CT. Radioisotopes, which composed of radiopharmaceuticals, are usually produced using cyclotron. Both PET/CT and cyclotron were introduced in Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital at the same time and several kinds of radioisotope (e.g., F-18, C-11, N-13) are currently produced in our hospital and used in patient care. Glucose metabolism in cancer cells is significantly increased compared to normal cells and the distribution of cancer cells can be visualized throughout the human body when the radioisotope-labeled glucose is injected in cancer patients. Thereby PET/CT has contibuted to the evaluation of cancer stage or dicision of treatment plan, such as surgery or radiation therapy in cancer patients. In addition, PET/CT is useful for the diagnosis of dementia or ischemic heart disease and it is expected to be helpful in the diagnosis of various diseases in the near future.