Shock waves in medicine

Robin Cleveland

Shock waves have been used for more than 30 years for the treatment of kidney stones. In shock wave lithotripsy, focused shock waves are used to fragment kidney stones into pieces that were small enough to be passed naturally and this non-invasive treatment revolutionised kidney stone treatment. Since then shock waves have been used for a number of other indications including: gall stones, plantar fasciitis, bone fracture healing, skin burn healing, and neovascularisation of the myocardium. Shock waves have also been shown to be effective at enhancing drug delivery into cells and assisting with gene transfection. There has been a wide range of success in these areas but none has resulted in the same paradigm shift as occurred in lithotripsy. In addition, shock waves play an important role in focused ultrasound surgery where they result in enhanced heating rates and can therefore accelerate treatment times. The presentation will discuss the principles by which shock waves can induce bioeffects, both desired and undesired, within the body. It will also contrast some of the contradictory results in the literature and discuss the opportunities to exploit shock waves going forward. [Work has been partially supported by NIH, NSF and Whitaker Foundation].

Mots clés: shock waves; biomedical ultrasound; therapeutic ultrasound

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Robin Cleveland. Shock waves in medicine. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811390⟩