Slashdot Mirror
Using Sound Waves For Outpatient Neurosurgery
eldavojohn writes "Got a piece of malfunctioning brain tissue in your head? Want to avoid messy lobotomies and skull saws? Well, you're in luck; a study shows that acoustic waves can do the trick and will hopefully treat patients with disorders like Parkinson's disease. A specialist said, 'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain — through the intact skull and skin — with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.' They focus beams on the part of the brain needing treatment and it absorbs the energy, which turns to heat. The temperature hits about 130 F, and they can burn 10 cubic millimeters at a time. Using an MRI to see areas of heat, they can watch the whole time and target only what needs to be burned. The study consisted of nine subjects suffering from chronic pain that did not subside with medication (normally they need to go in and destroy a small part of the thalamus on these patients). After the outpatient procedure, all nine reported immediate pain relief and none experienced neurological problems or other side effects after surgery."
...this becoming an easy-to-use, new, important tool in our government's management of us.
(As an aside I notice that more and more of my posts are made as AC due to my increasing paranoia.)
Unless, of course, you have the regions overlap.
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is different from the ultrasound used for diagnostic purposes, such as prenatal screening. Using a specialized device, high-intensity ultrasound beams are focused onto a small piece of diseased tissue, heating it up and destroying it.
this sounds like it could be a good video game!
This is fantastic technology but it also helps to illustrate the reason we are currently in the health care mess - i.e. spiraling prices. The cost associated with this treatment is so great that the benefit enjoyed by the recipient can never be paid off by their gain of function.
That is to say, if these patients wouldn't have been treated they would have made X amount of money. With treatment they may make marginally more, lets say X+Y. However, since Y is only maringally more, over the lifetime of the patient the sum of the Y can never equal the initial investment of the surgery. Thus the bill is ultimately covered by us, that is society, in one way or another. Either the bill is footed by the insurance company which will raise the rates for those involved, or by the hospital, which will then seek out for government aid to stay afloat.
Realistically we need to start realizing that not every person DESERVES the best treatment, because the best treatment is so costly that society can never regain that investment. To think otherwise is to bankrupt ourselves.
130 F is right between rare and medium rare. I wonder what well done feels like.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain—through the intact skull and skin—with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.
Ah, the miracle of modern medicine.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The air inside her head would expand blowing out her eardrums.
Like gamma knife without the radiation.
This should increase it's availability and reduce the expense of such procedures, especially on otherwise inoperable brain lesions (for which gamma knife may be suitable)
I don't know if it can be used near blood vessels, however, since blood has a way of carrying away heat
Could this be used on other parts of the body for cancer and such? Since the brain does not feel pain, you would have to use some kind anesthetic on other parts of the body.
Actually I find the fact that we just go in there and destroy a relatively large part of the brain as the leading edge technology kind of amazing. The fact that it seems to work is even more amazing. But essentially this is a hammer, made to work on the opposite side of the wall. You still go in there and destroy whatever is there. Just weird to me that this is the cutting edge so far in brain surgery is all. Just goes to show how far we still have to go.
I don't know why, but this type of treatment seems obvious to me... Anyone else?
Maybe I've been watching too much scifi.....
that I needed to keep the volume down on my headphones and not blast that garbage into my head. I guess one day they'll look around in my skull and find tissue cooked into a rude shape.
I'm curious to know how they control the heat disippation. In fact, there are probably other invasive procedures involving burning away tissue with lasers as well, where I wonder how they protect surrounding tissue from the heat. It seems that in the brain in particular, some tissue would be susceptible to damage by high temperatures, even if that temp doesn't actually burn anything away.
Any ideas, Dr. Slashdot?
McCoy and Crusher and Bashir never cut anybody open, they use... er, it looks like the technique from TFA. Communicators, flat screen computers, self-opening doors, etc. Now this.
Amazing. When do I get my matter replicator?
Free Martian Whores!
Darn, the tin foil in my hat won't work against this! I'm going to have to add some sound-absorbing cotton wool too in order to keep the CIA out of my head!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain
trick question, blondes don't have brains
Could this technique be used for people who are super morbidly obese to kill of the section of their brain than gives them an appetite? I mean they would still have to eat, but they would have to make eating a routine like brushing your teeth, etc...
Or would there be issues getting them to FIT into a MRI to do the procedure in the first place. I see a future where fatties are put into the MRI for 30 minutes until parts of their brains reach 130 degrees and they loose their appetites.
Of course me being a fattie, I wouldn't mind having a part of my brain scotched if it could kill off my ravenous appetite.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
and now my ice cream thinks trees are precisely why shoe laces bark the 1812 overture spatula rice mommy.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Of course "logically" he is correct but, we all know that logic is the way to arrive at the wrong answer with confidence.
Sorry but this comment is just a whole bunch of fail -- first of all, neither you nor I know how this process works. First off, you are complaining about the deficiencies of something we have never been able to do before? You do realize that the alternative is cutting open your skull and digging around in your brain, right? And then it never states in the article that the size is fixed at 10mm3 (although it very well might be) and even if it is, I am fairly certain that they would have figured out a way around this deficiency, like, you know, overlapping treatment regions or something?
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Now they won't laugh anymore when I tell them I have noises in my head
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
OMG! They have found a way to focus my wife's voice into a concentrated stream OHH Noes!
... is about 54 degrees Celsius, by the way.
C'mon, America. Catch up with the world's weights and measures. ;-D
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain â" through the intact skull and skin â" with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.'
Something about the word "lesions" doesn't quite make me think "safety". Reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Jim Carey's character asks if there is any risk of brain damage and the guy tells him that "technically, it is brain damage".
They already use it on some other tumors--I think some uterine tumors, for example. This version is for the brain and has some particular tricky problems associated with it, notably that the skull can absorb sound waves and its density varies--kind of like how when you build a nuke you need to focus the shock waves right, through solid materials of different densities.
(Only on Slashdot could you simplify something by comparing it to building a nuke)
When she was still a redhead. You do know that the different between a redhead and a blond is little more then the redhead hasn't had all the fire fucked out of her yet don't you?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Would be nice if they could use this to destroy the two pinpoint spots of brain damage my girlfriend has that cause her epilepsy. She's afraid of surgery (doesn't want her skull opened up, and who can really blame her?) but she would be one to try something like this in a heartbeat.
Blondes are only dumb because bleach causes brain damage. So I think this technique may be applicable...
Q-BTW, how can you tell if a blond has been using your computer?
A-There's whiteout on the screen.
Q-How many blondes does it take to change a lightbulb?
A-None, some horney man will change it for her.
Q-How many blond feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A-THAT'S NOT FUNNY YOU FUCKING PIG!
Q- Why was the parent post modded "offtopic"?
A- The moderator was blonde!
Free Martian Whores!
What springs to mind first is the terrible potential to abuse this technology on political prisoners, criminals, etc.
Depending on how well you pinpoint certain areas of the brain, but I wonder if you can permanently destroy a person's effectiveness at whatever skills the government doesn't want them pursuing. It sounds like this procedure doesn't leave any external evidence, and the internal lesion may not be readily identifiable without biopsy.
"We will release you to your family immediately, but only if you consent to this minor procedure...."
Wasn't this in an episode of The Prisoner? That show was way before its time.
I'm pretty sure this technique is already in daily use. From what I can tell, it involves rap, subwoofers, and the patient driving by my house at 11:30 p.m.
I much prefer language like "60th trimester abortion", but that requires me to do math...
As someone who lives with chronic pain, let me say you are so far off the mark.
I do respond to medication, but the only pain-killers that work are very heavy - Fentanyl.
I haven't had a full time job for many years. I never will without advances in the treatment of pain. If a procedure like this may mean I can work again, and pay taxes. Then I can afford expensive medical insurance.
More importantly, my kids then have a Dad who works full-time. They see that working leads to reward. They see that working hard at school can lead to a better life. At the moment my 16 y.o. sees no point in trying, as life can throw a curve ball and fuck you over. So if I could get something closer to a "normal" life, my kids will see me modelling better work-ethics and will be more likely to emulate my success. They see there's a point to trying to achieve their level of personal excellence, earn more money, pay more taxes and have more productive and potentially happier lives.
That's 6 people now pay more taxes.
Now I'm a maths teacher by vocation. If I was able to teach full-time I would be able to show several hundred kids a year that maths is easy, maths is fun, and that they can use it to solve real problems in everyday life. A few of these kids will go on to do amazing things, just because I can do what I am good at doing, and I can do it well. Over say 20 years there would be a significant number of people who have happier lives, earn more money and pay more taxes.
That's say 300 people now pay more taxes.
It's been shown in the literature that children of professionals are significantly more likely to undergo tertiary study and become professionals. So the children of the kids that were inspired to greatness by having a great teacher are more likely to have happier, more productive lives with higher paying jobs.
So there are potentially thousands of people who are paying more taxes, who are making great discoveries, and are generally happier, just because my pain is better managed without putting knives inside my head.
Look past the short-term benefits to the individual, and look at the potential returns to society and humanity as a whole, and the pay-off of a (admittedly) expensive procedure becomes enormous. And the return to the individual who suffers otherwise incurable chronic pain is not something measured in $$. To not wake up crying because I didn't die in my sleep would bloody marvellous. It's the possibility that there will be advances that help me that has kept me from suicide, and I'm not Robinson Crusoe.
so you thing cutting open a skull and tying the pieces back together with pieces of strings is NOT messier than just destroying the tumor without any skull saws?
I don`t get where this meme is coming from. Ive seen it mentioned lots of places...the kooky idea that robots and computer software will soon be doing SURGERY.
Out of all the jobs on this planet, surgery is going to be one of the last ones replaced by automation. Nearly every other form of employment is easier to automate. Surgery is a series of delicate, deliberately chosen steps that requires an enormous pool of knowledge and experience to do successfully. Surgeons go through more years of training than any other job on the planet. The actual physical motions and dexterity have little to do with what makes it difficult : as the Dean of my medical school said, surgery is about knowing when to operate, not doing the procedure itself.
Yes, telepresence bots are used to hold some of the instruments...but that in no way even slightly reduces the need for an educated professional at the controls of the robot.
they're using Britney Spears waves to create the lesions.
Also, we now know what makes the RIAA people brain dead.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi
"During traditional surgery for Parkinson's, for example, the neurosurgeon stimulates the target area with the electrode to make sure he or she has identified the piece of the brain responsible for the patient's motor problems, and then kills that piece of tissue."
I got my PhD in psychology, but the work was done in the Center for Parkinson's Research in the chemistry department. At NIH I worked for a guy that did lots of studies on Parky's, and he loaned me out to other labs doing Parky's work to help develop new data collection and analysis techniques. I did work for a review paper on Parky's research and treatment techniques when I was with the psychiatry department at Yale Medical School. I've worked in surgery doing intra-operative neural monitoring -- I don't hold a knife, but I do hold that probe, test the target areas, and tell the surgeon where he can and can't cut. I know my way around a brain and a good bit about Parky's. That's not to ring my own bell, but is a set up for my response to TFA.
I've never heard of surgery for Parky's. If someone said they were going to have it I'd convince them not to. If a surgeon said they were going to do it, I'd offer to smack his hands. There are so many other things that can be done that it's foolish to kill off perfectly functioning brain tissue (motor area or thalamic circuitry feeding it) just because the circuitry that suppresses all but the desired actions (dopamine carrying inhibitory innervation) is running low on power because its source (substantia nigra) is itself dying off. Quite often the problem resolves itself because the various uninhibited signals wear themselves out fighting against each other, and some motor control can be retained. But if you kill the circuitry, it can't possibly be recovered.
When motor activity must be brought down due to disinhibition allowing random activity to become harmful, you can always do cryo-ablation of the nerve trunk coming off the spinal cord, killing off a small portion of it temporarily. It lasts around 18 months. You can redo it then if the problem returns, or let it recover if not. This is done as outpatient treatment in clinics by anesthesiologists all over, for chronic pain and such. Doing it to motor nerves differs not one iota in principle.
There's plenty of other alternatives, some approved by cross over for treatment of other symptoms, such as hydergine + nootropil conjunct (approved to delay or prevent dementia; helps sensitize the cortex to a lower level of dopamine), and high dose gabapentin to make those neurons that receive the dopamine signal and control cortical pyramidal cell circuitry to make them more effective.
If I ever run across a surgeon that wants to ablate some cortex or otherwise kill off brain tissue to treat a chemically based control signal failure, I'm going to attempt to alter his consciousness on the subject with an experimental technique of my own: corrective phrenology.
For the unlearned, phrenology is the discredited technique of reading the bumps in the various regions on one's head to determine the greater or lesser contributions from those areas to one's collective make up. Corrective phrenology is applying kinetic energy in the form of a good whack in order to change the size of the bumps and so the relative contributions of the areas this is applied to. The technique is discredited because nobody ever proved what areas do what, although we know that applies to the brain. So my technique would be experimental in that I'd have to give a good many whacks in various places to see what accomplishes the job. I'm thinking a Craftsman five pound ball peen cranial impact probe would be an appropriate tool.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I know this can be beneficial, but this is too close to ice pick lobotomies for comfort.
And this seems like it is ripe for abuse by totalitarian states.
Creed and Linkin Park have been performing live lobotomies for years.
I record my sleeptalking
This is a dream technology. I'm a former neuroscientist and I can tell you this is the ultimate in behavioural change tools. They will make a less precise portable version. - Deviant people, simply ablate, won't even have to know - Addictions can be treated - IQ can be reduced - Social people can be made less so by frontal lesions. - Articulate people can be made less so by temporal lesions - List is endless.. It is horrendous technology. You can't feel brain damage. You wake up with a slurry speech and can't remember what your life was about, they have gotten to you.
make the (very loud) voices in my head stop!
They do seem to have some kind of research . http://www.vedicvibration.com/Research.htm
This sounds an aweful lot like The Kanzius Machine
the guy who created it is dying of cancer but its undergoing testing by the FDA if you watch the 60 minutes special on it they talk about injecting the affected areas with metallic laced particles to localize it to only the cancerous or affected areas clearly they are testing this in other areas as well BTW this guy was a former Radio Engineer and made the prototype in his garage with his wife's pie pans amongst other things maybe one day curing cancer will be a hack you can build yourself. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml