Treatment of breast cancer with focused ultrasound: Opportunities and challenges

Improved early detection methods and treatments have led to the reduction of breast cancer mortality, yet there remains a need for more conservative, more efficacious and less invasive breast cancer treatments. Focused ultrasound (FUS) is a promising non-invasive treatment for localized breast cancer. Magnetic resonance guided FUS leverages breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to plan, monitor and assess treatments under MRI guidance to attain tumor destruction with focused ultrasound, achieving excellent cosmetic, therapeutic, and safety results. MRgFUS is one of the most attractive emerging minimally invasive procedures for breast cancer. This talk will present different focused ultrasound mechanisms that can be used to treat breast cancer and discuss the design considerations that must be considered when developing transducers, sonication protocols and imaging techniques for the treatment of breast cancer with therapeutic ultrasound. Preliminary results from ongoing breast cancer MRgFUS clinical trials will be presented and future opportunities and ongoing challenges for this exciting technology will be elucidated.