Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by chiph on Monday December 22, 2025 @06:00PM
(#46360234)
I finished treatment for prostate cancer this summer. Most of my time in the x-ray machine was spent getting the alignment right. They'd take a CT scan, do some image analysis and other computations, then adjust the table some small amount before turning the beam on.
I'm curious how they do the alignment with the histotripsy machine. I would think that they could obviously do an ultrasound scan to get the gross alignment correct. But perhaps there is a CT scan afterwards that lets them make the fine alignment. It probably also helps that the liver is a much larger gland so aiming is less critical?
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by cogman10 on Monday December 22, 2025 @06:42PM
(#46360627)
I'm not sure how they do it exactly. I know just the nature of the machine is that it has a massive array of ultrasound emitters and sensors.
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by elcritch on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @08:33AM
(#46365198)
Ideally it'd just be software driven. Take an ultrasound scan, adjust, blast. In theory this could be done in milliseconds to counter patient movements. Pretty nifty really!
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by doctorpangloss on Monday December 22, 2025 @10:21PM
(#46362078)
Pretty pricey, yes. HistoSonics is a microcosm of the truth of healthcare spending: it is an amazing technology made by possible by deep and sophisticated capital markets. But, better health technology seems to explain more than 50% of the growth of healthcare spending since medicare (1965), meaning all of the faster-than-GDP growth people gripe about. When people talk about slowing health spending to something manageable, they are talking about not just govt not paying for things like histotrispy - not paying is a shell game, nobody chooses to not pay to save their life, and hence faster than GDP healthcare spending growth is observed everywhere in the West, not just the US. They are talking about somehow making the technology not happen altogether.
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by pointbob on Monday December 22, 2025 @10:45PM
(#46362223)
Cool
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by valcron1000 on Monday December 22, 2025 @11:22PM
(#46362395)
I'm unfortunately on the same situation. We made a consultation with people from Baptist Health Miami and it seems like there are several non trivial requirements for such treatment (histotripsy), like the number and location of mets. Hope that this improves in the mear future.
Re:Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors
by dr_dshiv on Monday December 22, 2025 @11:50PM
(#46362510)
> When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.
I think we were all thinking that. Acoustic Cavitation has also been proposed as a mechanism for enabling cold fusion. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1067589
What this does better than pretty much anything else is it isolates the destruction of cells to just the target. The liver is a VERY "bleedy" organ. It has a ton of blood that flows through it which makes surgery extra hard. In fact, the not this surgery that's next best for our circumstances laparoscopic through the arteries to drop a radioactive pellet in the center of the cancer.
The non-invasive nature of this is going to be very good for the future of cancer treatment. Minimizing scaring and damage to tissue is the number 1 factor to better results.
The only reason my local oncologist does not have this machine is they are still pretty pricey.
When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.