Ultrasound for the brain

Abstract

A man comes into the clinic, hands trembling. He can barely write or hold a cup of water. He straps on a specialized head device, lies back and slides into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Across the room, a physician pushes a button -and the shaking stops. Handed a piece of paper, the man signs his name legibly, hands steady.This kind of transformation is not wishful thinking. Videos documenting such interventions are readily available online. At their heart is a newly approved technology that uses MRI to aim ultrasonic waves -best known for use in prenatal monitoring -at specific areas of the brain. "We can focus the ultrasound through the skull to a part of the thalamus about the size of a grain of rice, " says W. Jamie Tyler, a neuroscientist who studies non-invasive brain stimulation at Arizona State University in Tempe. In that scenario, ultrasound heats and kills neurons in the thalamus, the brain area thought to give rise to a movement disorder called essential tremor, which affects millions of people worldwide. Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved focused ultrasound thalamotomy as a treatment for people with essential tremor who haven't responded to medication.Today, some scientists are setting their sights on another frontier. By influencing the brain more subtly -zapping small groups of neurons enough to boost or suppress their activity without killing them outright -ultrasound could potentially treat other movement disorders, as well as depression, anxiety and a host of intractable neuropsychiatric disorders, as easily and painlessly as the procedure that calms shaking hands, says Shy Shoham, a biomedical engineer from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who is starting a lab at New York University Langone Medical Center.The emerging technology, called focusedultrasound neuromodulation, makes use of energies at least an order of magnitude lower than those used for treating tremor. Instead of blasting and killing brain cells, Shoham says, "you basically dial down the system".To some extent, other non-invasive techniques can already do this using magnetic fields or direct electric currents. Transcranial TECHNOLOGY FEATURE © 2 0 1 7 M a c m i l l a n P u b l i s h e r s L i m i t e d , p a r t o f S p r i n g e r N a t u r e . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

Sonodynamic therapy induces oxidative stress, DNA damage and apoptosis in glioma cells

“…7 Landhuis proposed the technique of transcranial ultrasound modulation, which has brought new hope to the treatment of many brain diseases. 8 It is worth mentioning that opening the BBB with ultrasound also enables a new strategy for glioma treatment. The combination of ultrasound and a sonosensitizer, called sonodynamic therapy (SDT), may combine the distinct merits of ultrasound and nontoxic sonosensitizers, providing a non-invasive, repeatable, effective and targeted approach for glioma therapy.…”

Ultrasonic Neuromodulation Causes Widespread Cortical Activation via an Indirect Auditory Mechanism

“…The use of ultrasound to elicit targeted changes in neural activity has been the focus of intense interest in 2 the neuroscience community due to its potential as a noninvasive technique with the ability to target deep-3 brain regions with millimeter precision (Landhuis, 2017). Multiple studies in rodents and other organisms 4 have documented the ability of ultrasonic neuromodulation (UNM), applied transcranially in wild-type 5 animals, to elicit motor responses (Tufail et confounding the interpretation of UNM experiments in basic neuroscience research and the translation of 10 this technique towards clinical applications.…”

The effect of anesthetic dose on the motor response induced by low-intensity pulsed ultrasound stimulation

“…Low-intensity pulsed ultrasound stimulation (LIPUS) has been proven to be a noninvasive method with high spatial resolution and a deep penetration depth [ 1 – 3 ]. The potential mechanism of ultrasound stimulation is that the ultrasound alters membrane conductance or membrane capacitance to induce a current effect [ 4 , 5 ].…”