Hey look - someone figured out some actual display methods! http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedi...

You've been doing Parkinsons research for probably about 10 years and you've never heard of a pallidotomy or a thalamotomy? There's thousands and thousands of these performed every year and the techniques have been around since the 1950s (although I'd much rather have it be performed today than back then... :) )

It's true, you'd rather fix the brain than destroy parts of it, but we just don't have the techniques to 'fix' the brain yet. And, the brain, as I'm sure you know, is an amazingly adaptive system. You destroy a tiny rice size section of the errant mis-firing cells (which aren't serving any useful purpose at that point anyway) and the function that they were supposed to be doing can be taken over by other parts of the brain.

And, the really nice thing about using focused ultrasound to treat this (besides the fact you don't have to crack open the skull) is that you can raise the temperature of your target point slightly - just enough to heat, not ablate the tissue - and you can observe the effects. Does the patient's tremors stop? No? Try the area next to your target...repeat, until you find the area that's causing the tremors. Then, make sure there's no additional side effects (which you can test since the patient is awake during the procedure) and if it checks out, you raise the temperature and permanently ablate the tissue.

Yes, MR guided focused ultrasound is currently approved by the FDA in the US to treat uterine fibroids (which affect 20-30% of all women), and in clinical trials in the US to treat the pain caused by bone cancer (it's approved for use in Europe).

There's also several clinical trials for using the technology on treating prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and many other forms of soft tissue tumors. There's also studies being done to use focused ultrasound to break up clots within the brain that can cause strokes.

Almost equally exciting, focused ultrasound can be used for targeted drug delivery. A desired pharmacological agent like a chemotherapy agent, antibiotics, or genes, can be encapsulated in a delivery medium (such as a lipid or a microbubble) and released into the blood stream. At the focal point of the ultrasound waves, the delivery medium can be 'burst', releasing the payload at ONLY that location which, again, is a target about the size of a grain of rice.

This can enable cancer treatments using chemotherapy agents that affect the tumor at just the location of the tumor, rather than effecting the entire body which can cause devastating side effects.

More information can be found at http://www.fusfoundation.org/