Explore more about: Ultrasound (US) therapy

Abnormal heart rhythms—cardiac arrhythmias—are a major worldwide health problem. Now scientists are using ultrasound for more accurate maps of arrhythmic sites in the heart for improved success of ablation procedures.

Focused ultrasound, the researchers hope, could revolutionize treatment for conditions from Alzheimer's to epilepsy to brain tumors -- and even help repair the devastating damage caused by stroke.

Researchers have used an ultrasound technique they pioneered a decade ago -- electromechanical wave imaging (EWI) -- to accurately localize atrial and ventricular cardiac arrhythmias in adult patients in a double-blinded clinical study. They evaluated the accuracy of EWI for localization of various arrhythmias in all four chambers of the heart prior to catheter ablation: the results showed that EWI correctly predicted 96% of arrhythmia locations as compared with 71% for 12-lead ECGs.

NIBIB-funded researchers use passive cavitation imaging, an ultrasound imaging technique, to create an image and estimate the amount of drug that crossed the blood-brain barrier to reach a specific location in the brain.

Photoacoustic microscopy technique allows researchers to analyze metabolic characteristics of cancer cells with laser light and high-frequency ultrasonic sensing.

Scientists say that protein engineering techniques might one day lead to colorful ultrasound images of cells deep within our bodies.