Cathy Bryan said she felt like she was appearing in a episode of the sci-fi classic “Star Trek” as she prepared Monday to undergo an advanced radio surgery at Kettering Medical Center that allowed her doctors to perform brain surgery without opening her skull.

“No blood. No recovery,” said the 53-year-old Beavercreek woman, who came to the hospital with here husband, Randy. “They do their thing. I go home, take a nap, and I’m good to go.”

Bryan’s doctors used the Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion brain treatment system to perform the outpatient procedure to remove residual pieces of a large benign tumor, most of which surgeons removed in August.

The Gamma Knife, which Kettering officials said is the only one of its kind in the Miami Valley, uses concentrated beams of radiation to precisely treat tumors and other brain pathologies without damaging surrounding healthy tissue.

Last week, Kettering announced it had been selected to receive $150,000 in software and hardware upgrades at no cost from manufacturer Elektra AB of Sweden.

“We have the only Gamma Knife unit in the region, and now the most advanced gamma knife in the world with our new upgrades,” said Douglas Einstein, director of the department of radiation oncology at Kettering. “With this machine…the accuracy of the pinpoint radiation I’m able to deliver is 0.2 millimeters, which is lower than the size of a pin tip.”

Bryan’s surgery required such precision because of the location of the tumor remnants left over from the original surgery.

“There were some small areas left that were adjacent to critical nerves,” Einstein said. The surgeon “felt that if he went in to remove more of that tissue she would have permanent nerve injury, so instead he referred the patient over for Gamma Knife.”

The Gamma Knife treatment takes about an hour and a half, and “there is greater than a 90 percent chance” that the patient will suffer no side effects, Einstein said.

In addition, the gamma knife upgrades now allow doctors to record the exact location of the treated area and how much radiation was used so doctors can work around previously treated areas if subsequent surgeries are required, Einstein said.

“We can record exactly where we were and transfer that data electronically to another system,” he said. “No other system has this at this in time.”