Explore more about: Ultrasound (US) therapy

Ultrasound scans, best known for monitoring pregnancies or imaging organs, can also be used to stimulate cells and direct cell function. A team of Penn State researchers has developed an easier, more effective way to harness the technology for biomedical applications.

NIBIB-funded engineers are using focused ultrasound to modulate motor activity in the brain without surgical device implantation, a first step toward non-invasive brain stimulation therapies.

NIH-funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated the potential of a neuromodulation approach that uses low-intensity ultrasound energy, called transcranial focused ultrasound—or tFUS.

A team has developed a new brain stimulation technique using focused ultrasound that is able to turn specific types of neurons in the brain on and off and precisely control motor activity without surgical device implantation.

NIBIB-funded researchers are investigating long-lasting, customizable nanobubbles for ultrasound contrast agents.

New research demonstrates that noninvasive neuromodulation via low-intensity ultrasound can have cell-type selectivity in manipulating neurons.

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.