News — The primary objective of this workshop was to develop a comprehensive R&D roadmap that would fast-track the use of focused ultrasound technology to treat a variety of brain disorders including benign and malignant tumors, Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, stroke, and epilepsy.
Participation was by invitation only, and representatives from academia, industry, NIH, and the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation were in attendance. The participants included 45 leading neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuro-radiologists, neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, physicists, product development managers and medical device company executives.
The workshop involved two and half days of intense, structured facilitated presentations and discussion complemented by ample time for informal discussion, networking and relationship building. Pre-work in the form of online surveys, review articles, and brain disease summaries was used by the participants helped to identify and prioritize clinical and technical issues for discussion.
The results of the workshop will be communicated in a forthcoming White paper and include:
1) The outline of a comprehensive R&D roadmap.
2) An actionable short-term plan for technology development, preclinical studies, and pilot clinical trials including the identification and prioritization of clinical indications to be addressed, technologies required to treat these indications, and sites where the research will be performed.
3) The creation of a collaborative research environment and structure that will enable rapid execution of this plan and accelerate the development and adoption of focused ultrasound surgery for treating a variety of disorders of the brain. In addition to fulfilling the specific objectives related to focused ultrasound surgery and the brain, the workshop established a contemporary model for accelerating the development of large-scale therapeutic devices. At the request of the participants, the workshop will be repeated in one year. According to Eben Alexander, M.D., the Foundation's Brain Program Director, "As a result of the funding that the foundation has received so far, we are in a position to support many of the the R&D initiatives identified as high priority by consensus of the participants. We are already looking ahead to attract further funding as we anticipate an increase in the number of technical, preclinical and clinical research projects stimulated by the workshop."
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