Sound medicine at Acoustics Meeting(nd on bacterial biofilms (4aBB7) will be...),Health

5) ACOUSTICS AND BRAIN CANCER

Doctors often treat brain cancers with a combination of radiation therapy and surgerybasically removing part of the skull and excising the tumor. When tumors are surgically removed, doctors will often implant a thin, drug-encapsulated wafer before replacing the skull that diffuses chemotherapy agent over time to help ensure that no remaining tumor cells survive.

This approach is too often unsuccessful, and brain cancers like neuroblastomas and neurofibromatosis remain the leading cause of cancer-related death in people under the age of 35. Part of the problem may be that cancerous cells migrate beyond the range of the slowly diffusing drugs.

Now George Lewis Jr. (george@cornellbme.com) and his colleagues at Cornell University are testing the use of acoustic pulses to help brain tissue absorb chemotherapy drugs faster. Using various pulse sequences, they showed that focused ultrasound could enhance the uptake of cancer drugs in brain-like tissues. They believe that focused ultrasound agitates the tissues matrices, causing enhanced permeability for the drug, and by mechanically pushing it with radiation forces where the acoustical waves are focused. The drugs can then spread further and faster into the tissues than by unassisted diffusion alone.

The talk Acoustic targeted drug delivery in neurological tissue (3aBB5) will be at 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 29.

6) TISSUE STIFFNESS AS A MEASURE OF A HEALTH

Monitoring a tissues material properties may not be as obvious a gauge of its health as looking at its biological or chemical properties, but changes to these properties can be a good indicator of disease. Areas of stiffness in a tissue, for instance, are often a good warning sign of cancerthe basic premise behind breast self-examination. Likewise when cance
'/>"/>