The 16th Annual meeting of Japanese Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound (JSTU) was held at Hokkaido University October 28–29, 2017. Attending on behalf of the Foundation, former Merkin Scholar Dong-guk Paeng, PhD, presented data on the transcranial focused ultrasound research projects that he completed during his fellowship.

The meeting drew approximately 100 participants, with 29 oral presentations, three special lectures, and five posters. One lecture was an invited talk about bubbles and antibubbles for ultrasound-guided drug delivery, and another was given by Prof. Shin-ichiro Umemura, who is soon to retire from Tohoku University, about contrast agent and bubble dynamics in cavitation under ultrasound exposure. The third special lecture was about hyperthermia treatment using focused ultrasound.

A session co-sponsored by Insightec featured MRI-guided focused ultrasound treatment of cancer and Parkinson’s disease. In a special session for the Korean Society of Therapeutic Ultrasound (KSTU), Korean scholar Dr. Juyoung Park spoke on focused ultrasound blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

The president of JSTU is Katsuro Tachibana, professor of anatomy at Fukuoka University, and the meeting’s organizing chair was Prof. Nobuki Kudo from the Division of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Hokkaido University.