Dr. Casey Halpern

So we have so much work to do there.

Eating disorders and TMS have been so sort of scarcely studied or there've been such little research done in that space.

And so it is an area that we need to work on.

So ultrasound right now, transcranial magnetic resonance guided focus ultrasound.

So this is an FDA approved method to deliver an ablation to the brain non-invasively.

There are researchers, myself included, that are trying to use transcranial magnetic-guided, magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound, or MRI-guided focused ultrasound, to use it in a modulatory way, not just as an ablation, but to drive neuronal activity, or inhibit it, perhaps.

We're still learning how to do that.

There are trials that are trying to understand if you can use ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier so you can deliver a medication to that specific area.

perhaps for a brain tumor or something like that.

So it's a very exciting field and it is FDA approved for tremor right now.

And so I actually do it routinely for patients with tremor with Parkinson's or essential tremor.

And so I love doing it.

It's often just kind of a miracle because there's no incision.

I don't have to place an electrode into the brain to achieve a similar result.

It's fabulously effective for these patients.

It treats patients on one side, usually their dominant hand or their worst hand.

And it really speaks to the fact that, wow, you can deliver noninvasively an ablation to the brain in a hypothesized zone that we think is related to the problem at hand.

And at least with tremor, it works really well.

Could this be effective for psychiatric disease, obesity, eating disorders?

Well, perhaps.