What is a metastatic tumor?
It is a tumor that has spread from another area of the body such as breast cancer, colon, kidney, etc. Yes, there has been an evolution in treating metastatic brain tumors. The changes being from whole brain radiation, which was the standard a few years ago, to using at the present time, the gamma knife to treat each individual metastases and not do whole brain radiation until, if ever, at a later date. The results are better and the morbidity to the patient is less using a gamma knife. Also, a recent large study has shown the recurrence rate after treatment to be higher when the linear accelerator is used as opposed to the gamma knife.
