An interesting news item I found at: www.medicaldeviceguru.com/showthread.phpt=6643Maybe this could be applied to epilepsy HIFU has been approved for the treatment of uterine fibroids and clinical trials for use to destroy the breast cancers and other tumors are ongoing. Treating the brain, however, requires a slightly different approach. The human skull acts as a shield, absorbing energy and distort the path of the waves as sound waves of ultrasound beams. InSightec resolve this difficulty designing a collection of more than one independently focusable transducers and placed in a helmet worn on the patient's head. The resulting level of control allows the operator to precisely offset the effect of protection, allowing the result you get to the desired location. A cooling system is also used to secure the skull does not overheat during procedure.Realtime magnetic resonance scans, known as MRI, are used to locate the desired focal point of the beams (which differs from one patient to another depending on your specific problem and individual brain morphology) and to monitor their effectiveness. The beam heats the target area to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to kill cells within the affected 10 volume.So cubic millimeters long, the new procedure has been tested in nine patients suffering from chronic pain point that has not responded to medication or intervention less severe. Traditional treatment for these patients is to eliminate a part of the thalamus using an invasive procedure involving electrodes placed through holes drilled in the skull or radiation, applied over many weeks or months. Ultrasound is much less invasive and effective immediately in one session. The nine patients in the test group first substantial relief once the procedure is complete. A few seconds of tingling or dizziness while beams were active were the only common side effects, one of the nine patients also experienced a mild headache. There are no neurological problems or permanent side effects of any kind occurred in any of the potential drawbacks of patients.The ultrasound procedure is that it includes no mechanism to verify that the appropriate section of brain tissue has been identified. neurosurgeons performing the invasive procedure of electrodes have the opportunity to zap specific tissue and observing the response to corroborate that correctly identified the location to remove. Ultrasound.An This is not possible with the expansion of the evidence with patients suffering from chronic pain more is planned for late 2009, are additional tests designed to treat the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and other neurological functional diseases.TFOT has previously reported on other innovative surgical procedures, including a new partial knee replacement for the addition of robotics and threedimensional images, the pills do little robot that specific surgeries, once ingested by the patient, and a new laser microscalpel individual cancer may point cells.Read more focused use of ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging of ultrasound to guide the beams on this website or the information InSightec Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation website. little information about the brain surgery procedure is also available on this product page InSightec. The summary of a paper describing the initial test results in the Annals of Neuroscience is also available in Wiley Interscience. quot; br br
