Comment by cogman10

2 days ago

Due to some family stuff, this is something I've been investigating. My oncologist has said "this will probably be standard care in a few years". The results and studies around this have been excellent.

What this does better than pretty much anything else is it isolates the destruction of cells to just the target. The liver is a VERY "bleedy" organ. It has a ton of blood that flows through it which makes surgery extra hard. In fact, the not this surgery that's next best for our circumstances laparoscopic through the arteries to drop a radioactive pellet in the center of the cancer.

The non-invasive nature of this is going to be very good for the future of cancer treatment. Minimizing scaring and damage to tissue is the number 1 factor to better results.

The only reason my local oncologist does not have this machine is they are still pretty pricey.

When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.

7 comments

cogman10

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chiph  2 days ago

I finished treatment for prostate cancer this summer. Most of my time in the x-ray machine was spent getting the alignment right. They'd take a CT scan, do some image analysis and other computations, then adjust the table some small amount before turning the beam on.

I'm curious how they do the alignment with the histotripsy machine. I would think that they could obviously do an ultrasound scan to get the gross alignment correct. But perhaps there is a CT scan afterwards that lets them make the fine alignment. It probably also helps that the liver is a much larger gland so aiming is less critical?

  • cogman10  2 days ago

    I'm not sure how they do it exactly. I know just the nature of the machine is that it has a massive array of ultrasound emitters and sensors.

    • elcritch  1 day ago

      Ideally it'd just be software driven. Take an ultrasound scan, adjust, blast. In theory this could be done in milliseconds to counter patient movements. Pretty nifty really!

valcron1000  2 days ago

I'm unfortunately on the same situation. We made a consultation with people from Baptist Health Miami and it seems like there are several non trivial requirements for such treatment (histotripsy), like the number and location of mets. Hope that this improves in the mear future.

doctorpangloss  2 days ago

Pretty pricey, yes. HistoSonics is a microcosm of the truth of healthcare spending: it is an amazing technology made by possible by deep and sophisticated capital markets. But, better health technology seems to explain more than 50% of the growth of healthcare spending since medicare (1965), meaning all of the faster-than-GDP growth people gripe about. When people talk about slowing health spending to something manageable, they are talking about not just govt not paying for things like histotrispy - not paying is a shell game, nobody chooses to not pay to save their life, and hence faster than GDP healthcare spending growth is observed everywhere in the West, not just the US. They are talking about somehow making the technology not happen altogether.