Cytoreductive Surgical Treatment of Pleural Mesothelioma in a Porcine Model Using Magnetic-Resonance-Guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) and Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA).

A combination of surgery and chemotherapy is the most effective treatment available for Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma (MPM). However, both cause significant collateral damage and cannot eliminate residual microscopic disease. This investigation aimed to compare and determine the feasibility of utilizing Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) and Magnetic-Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) as alternative treatments for MPM.

Low-Cost 3-D Hydrophone Scanning Tank with MATLAB GUI Control.

The Focused Ultrasound Foundation has developed a low-cost, validated, open-source hydrophone scanner for the spatial characterization of ultrasound transducers. Assembly instructions and a MATLAB control graphical user interface are provided such that the device can be easily replicated for less than $1000 in roughly 40 person-hours. The low-cost scanning tank's performance was compared with data collected with a commercial automated scanning tank.

Intracranial inertial cavitation threshold and thermal ablation lesion creation using MRI-guided 220-kHz focused ultrasound surgery: preclinical investigation.

Object: In biological tissues, it is known that the creation of gas bubbles (cavitation) during ultrasound exposure is more likely to occur at lower rather than higher frequencies. Upon collapsing, such bubbles can induce hemorrhage. Thus, acoustic inertial cavitation secondary to a 220-kHz MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) surgery is a serious safety issue, and animal studies are mandatory for laying the groundwork for the use of low-frequency systems in future clinical trials.

T1-weighted MRI as a substitute to CT for refocusing planning in MR-guided focused ultrasound.

Precise focusing is essential for transcranial MRI-guided focused ultrasound (TcMRgFUS) to minimize collateral damage to non-diseased tissues and to achieve temperatures capable of inducing coagulative necrosis at acceptable power deposition levels. CT is usually used for this refocusing but requires a separate study (CT) ahead of the TcMRgFUS procedure. The goal of this study was to determine whether MRI using an appropriate sequence would be a viable alternative to CT for planning ultrasound refocusing in TcMRgFUS.

The road to clinical use of high-intensity focused ultrasound for liver cancer: technical and clinical consensus.

Clinical use of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) under ultrasound or MR guidance as a non-invasive method for treating tumors is rapidly increasing. Tens of thousands of patients have been treated for uterine fibroid, benign prostate hyperplasia, bone metastases, or prostate cancer. Despite the methods' clinical potential, the liver is a particularly challenging organ for HIFU treatment due to the combined effect of respiratory-induced liver motion, partial blocking by the rib cage, and high perfusion/flow.

Cost-benefit tradeoffs in engineered lac operons.

Cells must balance the cost and benefit of protein expression to optimize organismal fitness. The lac operon of the bacterium Escherichia coli has been a model for quantifying the physiological impact of costly protein production and for elucidating the resulting regulatory mechanisms. We report quantitative fitness measurements in 27 redesigned operons that suggested that protein production is not the primary origin of fitness costs.

Optimal imaging of in vitro clot sonothrombolysis by MR-guided focused ultrasound.

Background And Purpose: As magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) sonothrombolysis relies on mechanical rather than thermal mechanisms to achieve clot lysis, thermometry is not useful for the intraoperative monitoring of clot breakdown by MRgFUS. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the optimum imaging sequence for sonothrombolysis.

Methods: In vitro blood drawn from 6 healthy volunteers was imaged using T1, T2 spin-echo, and T2 gradient-echo (GRE) sequences both before and after sonication using an Insightec ExAblate 4000 FUS transducer.

Structural mapping of protein interactions reveals differences in evolutionary pressures correlated to mRNA level and protein abundance.

Genome-wide studies in Saccharomyces cerevisiae concluded that the dominant determinant of protein evolutionary rates is expression level: highly expressed proteins generally evolve most slowly. To determine how this constraint affects the evolution of protein interactions, we directly measure evolutionary rates of protein interface, surface, and core residues by structurally mapping domain interactions to yeast genomes. We find that mRNA level and protein abundance, though correlated, report on pressures affecting regions of proteins differently.