[Times photo: Fred Victorin]
A crane lowers a 44,000-pound cast iron ball onto the Bayfront Medical Center grounds in St. Petersburg on Monday. The Gamma Knife will bombard brain tumors with radiation, letting doctors perform surgery on growths once considered inoperable.

ST. PETERSBURG -- It's a precision medical instrument. It's used for delicate brain surgery.

It just happens to weigh 44,000 pounds.

And installing it is no simple task.

Technicians arrived at Bayfront Medical Center on Tuesday morning with the huge device, a 6-foot-tall blue sphere called the Gamma Knife. The radiation-shooting ball allows brain surgeons to penetrate the skull without a scalpel.

The Gamma Knife, worth $4-million, was shipped from Stockholm, Sweden, to the United States and then delivered to the hospital on a flatbed truck, where it was lifted with a crane.

The 22-ton capsule is made from cast iron. In the event of a power failure or another emergency, the hospital has a 2-foot wrench that turns the Gamma Knife on and off.

By the end of today, technicians from Elekta Instruments' office in Atlanta and Stockholm hope to finish installing the machine, one of 68 in the country and four in the state. It will sit in a concrete vault in the medical center, where a radiation oncologist, a neurosurgeon and a medical physicist will eventually operate it through a separate control room.

And there it will be used to save lives.

Patients with brain tumors or malformations will be placed into the giant circular capsule where 201 beams of radiation penetrate the diseased area without opening the skull. According to Dr. Kent Larsen, Bayfront's medical physicist, the size and thickness of the ball prevents that radiation from seeping out.

"It's a very intense radiation source," Larsen said.

A battery system attached to the Gamma Knife charges when the machine is not operating. Hence, the ball that shoots out the radiation can be plugged in the wall like any toaster or blender.

Elekta, whose headquarters is in Sweden, is the only company in the world that makes the Gamma Knife. Over the next few days, the company will use a 9-ton machine to install radiation into the Gamma Knife. The radiation sources are the size of a pinkie finger. The unit will be fully functional by May, officials said.

[Times photo: Kinfay Moroti]
Bayfront physicist Kent Larsen, left, and security guard Jim Ward inspect equipment used to build the ball.

The work takes six technicians. They use an 8-foot-high toolbox and an iron cask that contains the radiation. A yellow and red sign, which looks more like a giant post-it note, sits atop the cask, warning onlookers of its hazardous contents.

The Gamma Knife was delivered by crane Monday and laid in a patio of Bayfront Medical Center. It will be moved into the hospital with heavy machinery once the radiative material is loaded. Larsen said the walls in the concrete vault are as much as 6-feet thick in some areas.

According to Cassandra Morrell, a spokeswoman at Bayfront Medical Center, the Gamma Knife procedure lasts no more than four hours, with actual treatment inside the capsule lasting up to 60 minutes.

The patient is exposed only to enough radiation to destroy the target area, while normal tissue incurs only minimal damage, she said.

The patient's head is placed into an aluminum helmet doctors call a halo, which prevents him or her from moving around during the procedure. Morell said most patients will be able to go home within a day.

"It can get to tumors that are traditionally inoperable," Morrell said. "We know people who have brain tumors will be happy to know that they will now have this surgical option available to them right here on the west coast."

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