Focused Ultrasound changed the life of one uterine fibroid patient
MRgFUS Brain Workshop 09
The Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation and Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia hosted a Brain Workshop for Magnetic Resonance guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) March 23-25, 2009 at a retreat in Chantilly, VA. The primary objective of the workshop was to develop a comprehensive R&D roadmap that would fast-track the use of this technology to treat a variety of brain disorders including benign and malignant tumors, Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, stroke, and epilepsy.
Participation was by invitation only, and representatives from academia, industry, NIH, and the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation were in attendance. Participants included 45 leading neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuroradiologists, neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, physicists, product-development managers and medical device company executives from around the world.
Pre-work in the form of online surveys, review articles, and brain disease summaries was used by the participants to help identify and prioritize clinical and technical issues for discussion.
The group consensus was to prioritize:
- movement disorders (Parkinson's Disease, Essential Tremors, and Dystonia)
- meningiomas
- metastatic brain tumors
- stroke
- epilepsy
The results of the workshop will be communicated in a white paper and include the outline of a comprehensive R&D roadmap, the current best treatment for these conditions, an actionable short-term plan for technology development, preclinical studies, and pilot clinical trials including the identification and prioritization of clinical indications to be addressed, technologies required to treat these indications, and sites where the research will be performed.
The workshop also enabled the creation of a collaborative research environment and structure that will enable rapid execution of this plan and accelerate the development and adoption of focused ultrasound surgery for treating a variety of disorders of the brain.
