From 9 to 14 March, LIMU heads, staff and postgraduate students took part in the 9th International Winter School on Therapeutic Ultrasound (Les Houches, France). The main objective of the School, held every two years, is to provide an overview of the rapidly developing interdisciplinary field of therapeutic ultrasound in the form of lectures from leading world experts.
The School was attended by 23 lecturers, ultrasound specialists, neurosurgeons and immunologists, specialists in magnetic resonance and computed tomography, representatives of grant funds and companies manufacturing medical ultrasound equipment, as well as about 50 postgraduate students and young scientists from 13 different countries.
The lectures traditionally covered various aspects of medical ultrasound. Lectures were given on the fundamentals of ultrasound propagation in soft tissues, mechanisms of ultrasound impact on tissues and various methods to visualize such effects, the use of focused ultrasound for neuromodulation and neurosurgery, biophysics and immunology of tumors, methods of analyzing bioeffects introduced by ultrasound, and many others. For example, neurosurgeon Mark Gallay from Swiss Institute of Focused Ultrasound Surgery (SIFUS, Bern) spoke about the methods and latest results of treating essential tremor and tremor caused by Parkinson’s disease using ultrasound and the main targets of ultrasound ablation in the brain for these diseases.
The director of the Comprehensive Oncology Center in Barcelona (KHUAB Institute) Joan Vidal spoke about the latest results of the clinical trials on focused ultrasound treatment of stomach cancer and liver metastases. Professor of oncology Elisabeth Repasky from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, New York, covered the topic of the nature of malignant tumors and the role of ultrasound in immunomodulation in their treatment, and one of the reports by the Director of Research at Physics for Medicine Paris (ESPCI) Jean-François Aubry was devoted to ultrasound phased arrays, where special attention was paid to phased arrays developed in our laboratory!
From LIMU, Vera A. Khokhlova participated as an expert in the field of histotripsy (mechanical disintegration of tissues by high-intensity focused ultrasound), Oleg A. Sapozhnikov – as an expert on calibration and characterization of ultrasound fields, and postgraduate student Daria Chupova participated in the student reports section.
In addition, participation of our senior researcher Anastasia V. Kvashennikova and graduate students Daria Chupova and Liubov Kotelnikova in the School was supported by a travel grant from the Foundation for the Development of Experimental and Theoretical Physics “Basis”.