A new biomedical innovation gives people who suffer from chronic pain hope.
A new biomedical innovation gives people who suffer from chronic pain hope.
Although pain is an essential
biological communication, there are several disorders that might cause pain
signals to malfunction. A person's chronic pain is typically caused by malfunctioning
signals that originate deep within the brain and cause false alarms concerning
wounds that have healed, limbs that have been severed, or other complex,
inexplicable situations.
People who experience this kind of
debilitating pain are always searching for new ways to manage it; however, a
recently developed tool from the University of Utah might finally offer a
workable, long-needed remedy.
Promising results of an experimental
therapy that has provided comfort to many individuals after just one treatment
session have been published by researchers at the university's Spencer Fox
Eccles School of Medicine and John and Marcia Price College of Engineering.
Now, they are going to be electing members of last trial.
The Diadem, a novel biomedical device
that employs ultrasound to noninvasively activate deep brain regions in hopes
of correcting the malfunctioning signals that cause chronic pain, is the
central component of this research.
The journal Pain has published the
results of a recent clinical experiment. This work is a translation of two
earlier studies that detail the special qualities and features of the device
and show its effectiveness. Those studies were published in IEEE Transactions
on Biomedical Engineering and Nature Communications Engineering.
Thomas Riis, a postdoctoral
researcher in Price's lab, and Jan Kubanek, a professor in the department of
biomedical engineering, carried out the investigation. They worked along with
graduate student Daniel Feldman in the departments as well as professor Akiko
Okifuji of anesthesiology at the School of Medicine.
The method used by Diadem is based
on neuromodulation, a treatment strategy that aims to control specific brain
circuit activity directly. Other neuromodulation techniques rely on magnetic
fields and electric currents, but they are unable to target the anterior
cingulate cortex—the part of the brain that was the subject of the researchers'
most recent experiment—selectively.
The researchers modified Diadem's
ultrasonic emitters to account for the way the waves refract off the skull and
other brain structures following a first functional MRI scan to map the target
region. Nature Communications published this process.