強出力集束超音波による胎児治療(特別講演2,第66回日本産科婦人科学会・学術講演会)

概要

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High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has excellent potential as a non-invasive therapeutic tool in various fields of medicine. We conducted a series of animal experiments to investigate the application of HIFU for arterial blood flow occlusion in rat, dog and rabbit models. Several prototype HIFU transducers in combination with imaging probes with Doppler capability were constructed and tested. We found that blood flow with any velocity in arteries with less than 2mm in diameter could be occluded by HIFU exposure lasting 10 second with the intensity of some kw/cm^2 as SPTA (special peak temporal average). Thereafter, we conducted a clinical trial under approval of the ethical committee, in which we irradiated HIFU to acardiac fetuses for the treatment of TRAP (twin reversed arterial perfusion) sequence. In four cases, HIFU was applied from outside the maternal abdomen to blood vessels of acardiac fetuses at the point at which the umbilical cord entered the body. In one case out of them, blood flow occlusion in the acardiac fetus was successfully achieved. However, the success rate was not high, then we have started to improve our HIFU probe for maintaining the imaging of target vessels during the period of HIFU exposure. These data of animal experiments and a successfully treated TRAP case were presented in the lecture.
2014-08-01