Transcranial focused ultrasound technology used to transiently open the blood-brain barrier, is capable of stimulating hippocampal neurogenesis; however, it is not yet known what aspects of the treatment are necessary for enhanced neurogenesis to occur. The present study set out to determine whether the opening of blood-brain barrier, the specific pressure amplitudes of focused ultrasound, and/...

Background/introduction Currently, thermal ablation via transcranial MRI-guided focused ultrasound is restricted to centrally-located regions in the brain. This limitation is the result of skull heating when the focal region is steered to more peripheral regions in the brain, along with other factors such as limitations in beam steering in the currently-available clinical brain focused ultrasou...

Background/introduction Transcranial focused ultrasound is emerging as a promising treatment modality for a variety of disorders including essential tremor and glioblastoma. However, traditional full-wave methods of simulating ultrasound pressure fields for these treatments, such as FDTD, are computationally intensive. The situation is exacerbated by the large area insonified by the transcrania...

Laser-enhanced cavitation during high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) was studied in vivo using a small animal model. Laser light was employed to illuminate the sample concurrently with HIFU radiation. The resulting cavitation was detected with a passive cavitation detector. The in vivo measurements were made under different combinations of HIFU treatment depths, laser wavelengths, and HIFU...