The 3rd annual meeting of Taiwan Association of Interventional and Therapeutic Ultrasound (TAITU) was held November 25, 2018, at Taiwan University Public Health College following the society’s mayoral and magisterial elections the previous day. With a theme of “State of the Art in Asia: Interventional and Therapeutic Ultrasound,” the sessions were dedicated in loving memory of Professor Fon-Jou Hsieh (1946-2018), a renowned Taiwanese obstetrician who pioneered the use of diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound and founded TAITU.

TAITU President Professor Chiung-Nien Chen, a surgeon at Taiwan National University Hospital, gave an introductory talk and moderated the first session. The first presentation described the first experience in Taiwan of transcranial focused ultrasound thalamotomy for essential tremor, a report of 32 cases by Dr. Wei-Chieh Chang, Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Show Chwan Memorial Hospital. Then Dr. Shu Chang from the National Health Research Institutes shared his experience in building a focused ultrasound product. Additional presentations covered localized prostate cancer treatment, uterine fibroids, and the results of over 500 adenomyosis treatments at Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital using Chongqing Haifu’s JC tumor therapeutic system.

Two Korean scholars, Prof. Jae-Young Lee and Dr. Juyoung Park, also discussed treating uterine myoma and adenomyosis with a portable HIFU system and creating blood-brain barrier disruption with focused ultrasound. Then two Japanese scholars, Profs. Nobuki Kudo and Katsuro Tachibana gave talks on high-speed microscopic observation of bubbles and non-shelled nanobubbles, respectively. After lunch, both Profs. Hao-Li Liu and Ai-Ho Liao talked about theranostic microbubbles for drug delivery. Dong-Guk Paeng, PhD, shared his experience as the Focused Ultrasound Foundation’s Merkin Fellow and described the work of the Foundation. Additional presentations described transcranial ultrasound stimulation of dementia for physical therapy and ultrasound-guided functional rehabilitation and pain management.

During lunch, the Taiwanese President and Secretary General, Professor Kai-Wen Huang, requested that his organization join to the exchange program between the Korean and Japanese Societies, and the three countries officially formed a collaborative Asian Society. TAITU asked KSTU to help host ISTU in 2020. Further details and plans of the collaborative program will be communicated via email, and the agreements will be officially signed at the next KSTU meeting, which is planned for September 2019 in Gyeongju City.

Special thanks to Dong-Guk Paeng, PhD, for attending the meeting and writing this report.