Robert Muratore

Quantum Now LLC

Publications in therapeutic ultrasound have been growing exponentially for the past four decades, n = 2 exp((t-1970)/6), R² = 0.965, and reached approximately 1440 papers in 2011. Adoption of new International Electrotechnical Commission standards by regulatory agencies such as the United States Food and Drug Administration will enable more rapid a...

The nervous system responds with finesse to incident ultrasound. Three conjectures are proposed, abstracted from the literature, which illustrate commonalities in the response of the peripheral and the central nervous systems, and serve as an introduction to the nascent field of ultrasonic neuromodulation. (1) A mathematical function fit to neurona...

Contributing reviewers The editors of the Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound, International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation and BioMed Central would like to thank the following people for their time, effort and insightful comments as reviewers in 2013. We greatly appreciate their support during the journal’s...

The Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound has been established to provide an open access, online venue for the exponentially growing body of work in biomedical ultrasound therapy.

Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies

Among current modalities, ultrasound uniquely offers both millisecond and millimeter accuracy in noninvasively stimulating brain tissue. In addition, by sweeping the ultrasound beam within the refractory period of the neuronal tissue, ultrasonic neuromodulation can be adapted to target extended or multiply connected regions with quasi-simultaneity....

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has been applied clinically as a noninvasive therapeutic tool. Atrial septostomy is a palliative treatment for pulmonary artery hypertension. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of atrial septal ablation in vitro using HIFU. Fourteen sections of atrial septum from pig hearts were treated....

A new signal interrogation concept, based on Synthetic Structural Imaging (SSI) physics, has been developed to guide therapies. The SSI method was previously successful in radar and sonar imaging; here it is demonstrated for acoustic scattering from penetrable biological targets. Operating at ultrasonic frequencies of several hundred kilohertz, SSI...

A growing body of work demonstrates the therapeutic value of sub-ablation ultrasound on various tissues. If ultrasound can safely manipulate neuronal tissue, then it might be possible to use it to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Anticipating such future applications, we investigated reversible bioeffects of very low dose focused ultrasound on neu...

Direct and safe manipulation of neurons by external means is an increasingly studied therapeutic modality with the potential to treat many neurological diseases. Anticipating such future applications, we investigated reversible bioeffects of very low dose focused ultrasound on neuronal cell morphology and function in vitro. To test morphological ch...

Small tears in tendons are a common occurrence in athletes and others involved in strenuous physical activity. Natural healing in damaged tendons can result in disordered regrowth of the underlying collagen matrix of the tendon. These disordered regions are weaker than surrounding ordered regions of normal tendon and are prone to re-injury. Multipl...

To understand and prevent brain injuries from head trauma, researchers study mechanically stressed neuronal tissue. To anticipate future application of controllable ultrasonic in-vivo stress, we investigated the effects of acoustic radiation force on in-vitro PC12 cells. Undifferentiated PC12 cells were serum-cultured in DMEMF12 on poly-L-lysine-co...

Mitral regurgitation, when it arises from functional restriction of mitral leaflet closure, can be relieved by surgical cutting of the mitral tendineae chordae. We hypothesized that high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) might be useful as a noninvasive extracorporeal technique for cutting mitral chordae. As a pilot study to test this hypothesis,...

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) produces immediate focal lesions without direct tissue contact. Previously, we reported the HIFU potential for cardiac ablation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possibility of myocardial ablation in the left ventricle of beating dog hearts with monitoring by 2-dimensional echocardiography. The...

OBJECTIVE: HIFU is a promising technique for treating cardiac ventricular diseases such as sustained ventricular tachycardia. Ablations can potentially destroy arrhythmogenic foci and block reentrant circuits. Towards this end, we have learned to control HIFU lesions in the canine model in vivo. METHODS: Experiment — Thoracotomies were performed on...

Spectral parameter imaging in both the fundamental and harmonic of backscattered radio-frequency (RF) data were used for immediate visualization of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) lesion sites. A focused 5-MHz HIFU transducer with a coaxial 9-MHz focused single-element diagnostic transducer was used to create and scan lesions in chicken br...

This study evaluated variables relevant to creating myocardial lesions using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). Without an effective means of tracking heart motion, lesion formation in the moving ventricle can be accomplished by intermittent delivery of HIFU energy synchronized by electrocardiographic triggering. In anticipation of future cl...

The potential therapeutic uses of ultrasound energy in cardiac disease have not been extensively studied. We have developed a means to deliver high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to myocardial tissue. Unlike other therapy modalities such as radiofrequency catheter ablation, this system has the advantages of not requiring direct tissue contact...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possibility of using high-intensity focused ultrasound (US), or HIFU, to create lesions in cardiac valves in vitro. Calf mitral valves and aortic valves were examined. Focused US energy was applied with an operating frequency of 4.67 MHz at a nominal acoustic power of 58 W for 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 s at 4-s...

The Sonocare CST‐100 Therapeutic Ultrasound System, designed for the treatment of glaucoma, was developed in the 1980s and became the first high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) device to receive Food and Drug Administration approval. The system arose from studies done by F.L. Lizzi, Eng.Sc.D., of Riverside Research Institute and D.J. Coleman,...

HIFU dose curves (lesion size vs. exposure parameters) exhibit scatter because of local variations in the acoustic properties of tissue. Therefore, clinical applications of HIFU, such as cardiac and cancer ablation, will benefit from the ability to distinguish treated from normal tissue, which can provide the surgeon with lesion monitoring. However...

Diagnostic ultrasound is used to measure distance from a transducer to selected tissue structure. In one arrangement, the focal point of a high intensity focused ultrasound transducer is adjusted in accordance with measured distance to the selected tissue structure. In a second arrangement a transducer transport apparatus moves a transducer to main...

A system for high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has been developed that integrates a digitally controlled diagnostic array system with a multichannel therapy system. HIFU therapy transducer arrays (5 MHz; 35 mm focal lengths; 32 mm diameter) have been tested and employed with the system. The HIFU arrays have central apertures housing a phased...

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) (4.5–7.5 MHz) was used to form lesions in cardiac tissue, with an ultimate objective of treating conditions such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and ventricular tachycardia. Ultrasound attenuation coefficients were experimentally determined in vitro for calf myocardial tissue, both muscle and pericardial fat....

The potential for cardiac applications of HIFU remains unexamined. In order to create reproducible lesions in a beating heart, it is necessary to maintain focusing at a certain position within moving myocardial tissue. One technique is to use multiple short HIFU exposures 0.2 s and synchronize them with an EKG signal and respiration. The left ventr...

The potential for cardiac applications of HIFU remains largely unexplored. In order to create reproducible lesions in a beating heart, it is necessary to maintain focusing at a certain position within moving myocardial tissue. One technique is to use multiple short HIFU exposures (0.2 s) and to synchronize them with an EKG signal and respiration. I...

A versatile biomedical ultrasound system has been developed and tested. The system controls and monitors high‐intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) exposures designed to produce therapeutic tissue lesions primarily by thermal phenomena. The system is used with custom HIFU transducer arrays that contain central diagnostic transducer arrays. The diagn...

This report describes a monitoring technique for high-intensity focused ultrasound (US), or HIFU, lesions, including protein-denaturing lesions (PDLs) and those made for noninvasive cardiac therapy and tumor treatment in the eye, liver and other organs. Designed to sense the increased stiffness of a HIFU lesion, this technique uniquely utilizes the...

Investigations are being conducted to develop a method using motion induced by radiation force to monitor HIFU lesions, by virtue of their increased stiffness. A therapeutic transducer, periodically excited at subthreshold levels, generates the radiation force: a collinear diagnostic transducer monitors the degree and time-course of induced motion....

A dual-transducer system was used to test concepts for on-line guidance and lesion monitoring during ultrasound therapy. The system used a spherical-cap therapy transducer with a central, A-mode transducer. Three operational modes were successfully tested in in-vitro liver specimens. Mode 1 senses in-situ therapy-beam harmonics that affect absorpti...

We have developed a dual-transducer technique to monitor tissue deformation induced by therapeutic ultrasound. The technique is designed to monitor and control therapeutic lesion size and location. Currently, the technique employs a spherical-cap high-intensity transducer with a central, co-linear diagnostic transducer. A-mode rf echo signals are f...

Probabilistic modelling of continuous current sources is applied to the analysis of MEG signals generated by current dipoles implanted in the head of a living human subject. Estimates of the distribution of activity within a circular disk are obtained from signals generated by a single implanted dipole and by a pair of simultaneously active implant...

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a new, noninvasive functional test equivalent to EEG. It has been used to localize the sources of evoked responses and interictal and ictal epileptiform discharges and to study patients with psychiatric illnesses, cerebrovascular accidents, and migraine. In epilepsy research, it is hoped that MEG will provide informa...

Antiprotons are presently produced and stored at CERN and Fermilab at a rate of about 10^7 p/s. Efforts are underway to develop transportable storage devices, ‘bottles’, which would store as much as 10^12 antiprotons for months, or years and make the antiprotons available anywhere. A workshop held last year at the RAND Corporation assessed the scie...

Antiprotons are of great promise in biomedical research and in practical biomedical and industrial applications. It is likely that antiprotons will be of far greater utility in the next century than x-rays have been in this century. Antiprotonic STEReography (ASTER), a 3-D photography-like imaging technique, is basic to most of the foreseen applica...

INTRODUCTION -The growing use of high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) for therapy has led to a need to characterize HIFU-transducer fields. Acoustic fields do not scale linearly with intensity; nonlinearities appear at therapeutic intensities and contribute to the therapeutic effect. Therefore, measuring the fields at the intensities of the int...