While the patient is still on the operating table, a lead disc is slipped behind the breast tissue to protect the chest cavity, and an eight inch wide electron beam focused directly on the area surrounding the tumour.
After he told the story in our M and M meeting, the hospital implemented a "time out" protocol in the operating room for everyone to stop and agree on what operation would be performed, on what side of the body and whether the correct patient was indeed lying on the operating table, to make sure that kind of mistake would never happen again.
Another problem, Einstein noted, is that doctors often don't know what a patient's heart rate will be until he or she is on the table being readied for the scan.