Adult‐rat‐brain tissues display an unusually high resistance to necrosis when serially irradiated with parallel, thin slices of a microplanar (i.e., microscopically thin and macroscopically broad) beam of synchrotron‐wiggler‐generated, approx. 35–120 keV (median approx. 50 keV) Gd‐filtered X rays at skin‐entrance absorbed doses of 312 to 5000 Gy per slice. Such microplanar beams were used to irradiate young adult rats bearing right frontocerebral 9L gliosarcomas (approx. 4 mm diameter), through a volume of tissue containing the tumor and contiguous brain tissue, either in a single array or in 2 orthogonally crossed arrays of tissue slices. Each array included 101 parallel microplanar slices, 100 μm center‐to‐center distance, each slice being approx. 25 μm wide and 12 mm high, with skin‐entrance absorbed doses of 312.5 Gy or 625 Gy per slice. Compared with unirradiated controls with a median survival time of 20 days after tumor initiation, the median survival time was extended in irradiated rats by 139 days (625 Gy, crossed arrays), 96 days (312.Gy, crossed arrays) or 24 days (625 Gy, single array). The tumors disappeared in 22 of the 36 irradiated rats, 4/ 11 even after unidirectional microbeam irradiation. The extent and severity of radiation damage to the normal brain in rats with or without tumor was graded histopathologically. Correlation of those grades with radiation doses shows that loss of tissue structure was confined to beam‐crossing regions and that only minor damage was done to zones of the brain irradiated unidirectionally. Int. J. Cancer 78:654–660, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

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