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High-pressure sound beam with 100 times sharper focus could one day be a scalpel
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A carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before. Researchers say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery.
Today focused sound waves blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat.
“A major drawback of current strongly focused ultrasound technology is a bulky focal spot, which is on the order of several millimeters,” Baac said. “A few centimeters is typical. Therefore, it can be difficult to treat tissue objects in a high-precision manner, for targeting delicate vasculature, thin tissue layer and cellular texture. We can enhance the focal accuracy 100-fold.”
The team was able to concentrate high-amplitude sound waves to a speck just 75 by 400 micrometers (a micrometer is one-thousandth of a millimeter). Their beam can blast and cut with pressure, rather than heat.
With a new technique that uses tightly-focussed sound waves for micro-surgery, University of Michigan engineering researchers drilled a 150-micrometer hole in a confetti-sized artificial kidney stone. Image credit: Hyoung Won Baac
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-12-20 01:02:59 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/12/high-pressure-sound-beam-with-100-times.html
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