What is focused ultrasound
Focused ultrasound is a non-invasive cancer treatment. In this video, Bradford Wood, MD, senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, explains how a focused ultrasound works to treat tissue and deploy drugs.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Focused ultrasound's one interesting one, which is actually non-invasive. So, much like you focus a magnifying
glass on a leaf in the summer as a child and try to heat that leaf and have it burn, this focuses the ultrasound beam in a very tight fashion
the size of a rice kernel. We can then move that rice kernel very fast around using MRI guidance. We can measure the temperature of the tissue
that we're heating up-- all noninvasively --without touching the patient. And we move that little rice kernel around in the body
and treat a certain area. We can end up treating a volume of tissue with temperature elevation. We can kill tissue that way. We can also deploy drugs.
We inject IV, a nanoparticle, which is deployed locally by this noninvasive heat.
So you now can have it deploy where it's needed, where the tumor is. Getting back to the imaging, because we know where the tumor is based on imaging,
we use that information while we're there. In this case, we're measuring temperature with MRI. So we can now see where the drug should be,
where the drug is going to be released. And we've actually developed a nanoparticle that has contrast in it. So now the drug not only goes there,
but it reports its location. So as we're improving this drug-device combination-- guided by imaging --we now are able to see where
the drug is actually going. The drug paintbrush comes alive where we can actually paint the drug where it's needed, based upon imaging,
rather than just giving the whole body a nuclear bomb against the whole body. [MUSIC PLAYING]
cancer
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