High intensity focused ultrasound for the treatment of rat tumours.

Discrete implanted liver tumours in the rat have been exposed to arrays of 1.7 MHz ultrasound lesions. Focal peak intensities in the range 1.4-3.5 k Wcm-2 were used for an exposure time of 10 s. It has been demonstrated that where the whole tumour volume was exposed to the focused ultrasound beam, no evidence of tumour growth could be detected histologically. Where the ultrasonic lesion array was not contiguous, regrowth occurred. Preliminary histological studies confirmed this finding.