An Introduction to Therapeutic Applications of Focused Ultrasound

This meeting will feature speaker Elisabetta Sassaroli, PhD from the Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital who will present on “An Introduction to Therapeutic Applications of Focused Ultrasound.” Join us for networking with other members of the IEEE WIE Boston! Refreshments and dinner will be served.

Date/Time:
Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
6:30 – 7:00 pm: Networking, dinner, and refreshments
7:00 – 8:00 pm: Presentation

Location:
Brookline Public Library
361 Washington Street
Brookline, MA 02445

Cost:
The cost is free however please register at https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/30971 so that we know how much food to order.

Abstract:
Focused ultrasound is an emerging field of medical ultrasound which is located at the interface of engineering, biology and medicine. The great advantage of focused ultrasound consists in our ability to concentrate the acoustic energy on a target deep in tissue precisely and noninvasively when the ultrasound beam is guided by magnetic resonance imaging.

Ultrasound bioeffects are thought to arise from contributions of thermal and mechanical origin with longer ultrasound pulses that generate higher thermal losses and shorter pulses that minimize such losses. Focused ultrasound has been shown to be effective in tissue destruction (ablation), in increasing the uptake of drugs at the target tissue, in enhancing the efficacyof radiation therapy (sensitization) and thrombolysis, in disrupting the blood brain barrier to enable a more efficient delivery of drugs to the brain, and in the modulation of neural activity.

Focused ultrasound is still at an early stage of development but it has the potential to transform the treatment of many diseases from cancer to neurological disorders. So far, the FDA has approved focused ultrasound guided by magnetic resonance imaging for thermal ablation of uterine fibroids (benign tumors of the uterus) and for bone metastases for the relief of pain. Outside the US, focused ultrasound guided by magnetic resonance imaging has been approved for a variety of cancer treatments (e.g. prostate), back pain, and brain disorders (e.g. essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease).

I will give a general introduction to the clinical and preclinical applications of focused ultrasound and I will describe some of my research in this field.

Speaker Biography:
Elisabetta Sassaroli is a medical physicist working on the development of image guided therapies technologies that include focused ultrasound guided by magnetic resonance imaging and gold nanoparticles as biomarkers for photomedicine applications. She has extensive experience in algorithm development, computer simulations, finite element modeling, and data analysis of acoustic, electromagnetic, thermal and fluid dynamics problems primarily for bioengineering applications. She has several publications on her field. She received her PhD in Physics from Northeastern University and she did her training in Medical Physics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. After that, she worked for the Methodist Hospital Research Institute (Houston, TX). She currently works as a research consultant and she is affiliated with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Radiology Department.

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