Precise New Form of Brain Surgery Requires No Incisions, Scalpels
upstart writes:
UVA Develops Precise Brain Surgery Without a Scalpel:
School of Medicine researchers have developed a noninvasive way to remove faulty brain circuits that could allow doctors to treat debilitating neurological diseases without the need for conventional brain surgery.
The UVA team, together with colleagues at Stanford University, indicate that the approach, if successfully translated to the operating room, could revolutionize the treatment of some of the most challenging and complex neurological diseases, including epilepsy, movement disorders and more. The approach uses low-intensity focused ultrasound waves combined with microbubbles to briefly penetrate the brain's natural defenses and allow the targeted delivery of a neurotoxin. This neurotoxin kills the culprit brain cells while sparing other healthy cells and preserving the surrounding brain architecture.
"This novel surgical strategy has the potential to supplant existing neurosurgical procedures used for the treatment of neurological disorders that don't respond to medication," said researcher Kevin S. Lee, PhD, of UVA's Departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery and the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). "This unique approach eliminates the diseased brain cells, spares adjacent healthy cells and achieves these outcomes without even having to cut into the scalp."
[...] The new approach is called PING, and it has already demonstrated exciting potential in laboratory studies. For instance, one of the promising applications for PING could be for the surgical treatment of epilepsies that do not respond to medication. Approximately a third of patients with epilepsy do not respond to anti-seizure drugs, and surgery can reduce or eliminate seizures for some of them. Lee and his team, along with their collaborators at Stanford, have shown that PING can reduce or eliminate seizures in two research models of epilepsy. The findings raise the possibility of treating epilepsy in a carefully-targeted and noninvasive manner without the need for traditional brain surgery.
Another important potential advantage of PING is that it could encourage the surgical treatment of appropriate patients with epilepsy who are reluctant to undergo conventional invasive or ablative surgery.
Journal Reference:
Yi Wang, Matthew J. Anzivino, Yanrong Zhang, et al. Noninvasive disconnection of targeted neuronal circuitry sparing axons of passage and nonneuronal cells. Journal of Neurosurgery, 2021 DOI: 10.3171/2021.7.JNS21123
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