 Hi there, my name is Dr. Seth Blacksburg. I'm the associate director of radiation oncology at Winthrop Hospital. I'm the medical director of the New York CyberKnife Center. I want to chat with you a little bit about the CyberKnife experience and what you could expect if you come in for a consultation with us. In general, we spend around an hour or so with folks. We go over all their information and talk with them at length about all their different treatment options for prostate cancer. We'll go over your PSA and what it means. We'll go over in-depth your biopsy report, we come up with a different treatment plan for every individual. We'll go through all of your options at length. We'll talk with you at length about the CyberKnife in particular if you're a candidate. The treatment itself for CyberKnife radiation usually involves five treatments and it's done usually on a daily basis. The first step is to place gold markers in the prostate gland. It's an outpatient procedure. It takes 15 minutes and we do it here in our center. For that treatment, the patient is lying down. We place gold markers in you and chat with you about that process through needles. And it's really through those gold markers that the CyberKnife machine is able to localize on the prostate gland. So you have the most technologically precise treatment possible with radiation. The next step would involve usually around a week or so later, patients come back and we do a planning CAT scan on you. We have you lie down in the treatment position. Since the CyberKnife is a very precise instrument, we don't need to immobilize your body unlike with other radiation. Instead, we make a general cradle of the body and you lie in it. The CAT scan itself takes about 30 minutes. The CAT scan is the dress rehearsal, if you will. And we map out all of the CyberKnife planning based on that CAT scan. Shortly afterwards, we do send you for an MRI as well. The CyberKnife is an amazing machine which has great precision for delivering treatment. But we want to make sure we have equal precision when we come up with your plan. So the same day as your CAT scan, you also will have an MRI. While you're at home and you're getting ready for treatment, which usually will start a few weeks after this whole process, we're busy at work. And so the first step is we'll fuse together three dimensionally that MRI and the CAT scan. Once that's done, the physician will go ahead and start outlining what they propose to treat. And that is usually the prostate gland, as well as the proximal or the close seminal vesicles. CyberKnife radiation is not cookie cutter. It's very individual dependent. And so we tailor each individual treatment to every patient. And this takes an enormous amount of time. We want to be as accurate as possible and minimize side effects while optimizing cure rates. Once we're done and we find a plan that meets all of our expectations, we're ready to proceed with treatment. The treatment itself would entail coming in to this room here or one of the other rooms at Winther Hospital. You'd lie down on this bed here called the couch and just stay still. You don't need to be frozen because the machine has the ability to see any motion both on the outside and on the inside of the body. During the treatment itself, you'll hear the therapist chat with you. It's a very open space, an open room, and so you are relaxed. The machine will move around you in many different angles. You will not feel any pain at all. It's like having an x-ray of your chest. You don't feel anything being done, but there are radiation or x-rays that are being delivered. After your first treatment, you go home, you come back the next day and we repeat the process. After five days, you are done with the treatment. At that point, you'll come in for follow up approximately four weeks later. If you have questions, you can call us at 1-866-WINTHRIP or visit us at winthrift.org.