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what we've done in our laboratory here which we call the "histotripsy" laboratory
is to develop a new surgical modality
which is uh... non-invasive and
it has real time image guidance in the form of ultrasound.
uh... imaging. The modality itself is a knifeless surgical
approach which
the idea here is to generate some very energetic
microbubbles ultrasonically. The generation of these bubbles is called cavitation.
And these bubbles oscillate very rapidly and create a lot of mechanical stress on all
the tissues and cells around it. And essentially mechanically fractionate these
cells, so that
at the end of the treatment if you look even under electron microscope
microscope you don't see any recognizable tissue fragments.
So basically what we do is generate what you might call micro or nano blenders.
week can generate these in a very
confined, precise volume.
That ultrasonic focus acts like essentially a scalpel. The range of application for
this technology is
anyplace where we want to remove tissue at a tissue fluid interface
we can actually either remove the tissue or drill a very precise hole through the tissue.
one of the applications that we've been developing is to treat
newborn infants who don't have a left ventricle.
These infants only survive
if you can create a flow channel in the septum between
the left-hand and
uh... right atrium.
The way that people do that now is to thread a very small catheter up into
the heart
and essentially punch a hole in this atrial septum and this is a very dangerous
procedure
with about fifty percent mortality and so we've developed an approach
where these uh... newborn infants will uh... we actually generator a hole in the atrial septum
We've done over a hundred dogs innumerable piglets and so we're now in the development of
this technology where we want to take it into the clinic so that the
pediatric surgeons can
employ it.
another application where we've founded a company called "Histosonics"
is the treatment of uh...
enlarged prostate.
BPH
and in this application we actually go in and
homogenize the tissue around the urethra
and this homogenized tissue is actually urinated out by the patient
uh... the whole thing is non-invasive
the alternative technology is called TURP which a
rotating blade is actually inserted.
Which if you think about it, it's a
procedure that
no one relishes and uh...
it's also rather bloody
and at least in the animal models that we've used ah...
there's minimal bleeding
and we get
very good results.
there are many other applications for example; breast cancer is one that we
will be developing fairly soon also uterine fibroids which is a big problem in
women's health and we're even working on ways of treating liver metastasis.