Читать книгу Anti-Aging Therapeutics Volume XIII - A4M American Academy - Страница 8

The physical principle of ultrasound, the piezoelectric effect where sound is created from electrical energy, was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie ten years before the recognition of the X-Ray. Early medical uses included imaging disorders of the eye, heart, and the developing fetus. As computers grew in sophistication, so did the applications of ultrasound, and now, it is often used as the first diagnostic test for many medical disorders. Doppler sonar, created in 1972, gives pictures of flow movement in the human body in the same way it shows motion in the weather patterns (Doppler radar) that one sees on television weather reports. Doppler technology has been around for years.

Urologists in Japan, oncologists in England, surgeons in the Netherlands, chemotherapists in Belgium, ultrasonographers in Norway, and radiologists in France, seeing the success of sonograms in diagnosing malignant tumors in the breast, turned their attention to the study of the prostate. They concluded that the vascular pattern shown by the Doppler technique held the key to the degree of malignancy. In 2002, German surgeons at the University of Ulm, the largest bone tumor center in Europe, showed bone cancers that were highly malignant had high blood flows. The current clinical use of Doppler equipment in Europe is keeping patients from unnecessarily losing their arms and legs to surgery. Historically, the standard treatment for bone cancer has been amputation of the entire limb; current surgical intervention has become more conservative, often removing a limited portion of the bone so the tumor can be removed with a rim of normal bone without the need for an amputation. However, by distinguishing cancer aggressiveness, Doppler techniques have refined this even more, since bone tumors that demonstrate no vascularity or low blood flows are now watched or treated more conservatively.

Dr. Nathalie Lassau, an interventional radiologist at the Institute de Cancerologie Gustav Roussy, an internationally known cancer center in Paris, published similar findings on the deadly skin cancer, melanoma. Her article in the American Journal of Radiology in 2002² revealed lethal skin cancers to be highly vascular and skin cancers that could be watched were not vascular. Dr. Lassau is currently investigating medicines to reduce blood flows to cancers in hope of lessening their malignant consequences and has presented this work at numerous international meetings. Her finding that 3D Doppler sonography correlates best with the pathologic process was highlighted at the 2011, Eighth International Symposium on Melanoma. Now, newer MRI imaging protocols are currently being fine-tuned based on the proven high accuracy of the Doppler sonography data.