Connecting Research and Experts with Journalists

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Ten-patient feasibility study shows potential for treating brain disorders with transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound.

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What’s easier: gaining regulatory approval for a new medical device, or convincing insurers to cover the treatments it provides? According to Susan Klees of the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, many experts say regulatory approval is the easier task.

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On June 12, 2011, CBS Evening News reported Stephanie Small’s gripping story. Suffering from a large uterine fibroid, the 27 year-old was treated with MR-guided focused ultrasound at the University of Virginia. The treatment changed her life, and Small is now an advocate for both focused ultrasound and patient empowerment, especially among young women like herself.

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In a presentation at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, University of Virginia neurosurgeon W. Jeffrey Elias, MD said that preliminary results of a pilot clinical trial indicate that noninvasive MR-guided focused ultrasound has the potential to safely and effectively control essential tremor, a neurological condition affecting 10 million Americans.

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The Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation's Research Awards Program is funding a Mayo Clinic study that will be the first to use U.S. commercial database information to compare the costs of three minimally-invasive treatments for symptomatic uterine fibroids, a benign and often debilitating condition that affects more than one in four American women.

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A recently published report in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry supports the potential of focused ultrasound to treat certain patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

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A pre-clinical study published this week in Science Translational Medicine suggests that focused ultrasound may hold a key to providing a non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease.

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The blood-brain barrier has been non-invasively opened in a patient for the first time. A team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto used focused ultrasound to enable temporary and targeted opening of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), allowing the more effective delivery of chemotherapy into a patient’s malignant brain tumor.

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Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) are starting the first clinical trial in the world using focused ultrasound to treat patients with epilepsy.

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Karun Sharma, MD, PhD, Director of Interventional Radiology, and colleagues at Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, have completed their clinical trial to treat benign but painful bone tumors (osteoid osteoma) in children.