Brain Program's Mini-Workshop Called "A Landmark Example" of Academic-Industrial Collaboration

Published:

On July 23 and 24, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation’s Brain Program hosted its first invitational mini-workshop to tackle important imaging problems with the help of a world-class team of MR experts from academia and industry. This highly successful workshop was a collaborative problem-solving session that generated solutions for improving the efficiency and safety of transcranial focused ultrasound treatments.

“Some of the solutions identified during the workshop will be applied in the very next brain patient procedure,” says John Snell, PhD, Brain Program technical director. “The solutions are expected to reduce treatment time by improving the quality of the MRI scans.”

Conducted at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, the workshop brought together representatives from industry (InSightec and GE Healthcare) and neurosurgeons, MR engineers and MR physicists from leading academic centers in the U.S. (Harvard, Stanford, Utah, the University of California San Francisco, UVA and Vanderbilt) and Europe (Institut Langevin and University Children’s Hospital, Zurich).

Following the workshop, Eyal Zadicario, director of Neuro Programs for InSightec, wrote, “Getting this team together is a great achievement for the Foundation and a landmark example of collaboration between academia and industry.”