Tissue destruction with focused ultrasound in vivo.

The management of some tumours presents a difficult surgical problem. Focused ultrasound surgery is a technique which provides the possibility of destroying, non-invasively, a selected volume of tissue at depth within an organ such as the liver whilst sparing overlying tissues. For the safe and effective use of this technique, it is essential to understand the way in which such a focused ultrasound surgery beam interacts with normal and malignant tissue and to study the histological response of different tissues to the ultrasonic insult. In this paper the histology of lesions in normal rat liver, as viewed by light and electron microscopy, is described.