Explore more about: Ultrasound (US) therapy

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.