Dr. Casey Halpern

Actually, that would be the ideal.

The problem is we don't know where to do the ablation.

There is a trial that we would like to do for OCD where we would deliver an ablation to the same area of the brain that we've been delivering ablations to for years for patients with OCD.

And it helps a bit, that's called a capsulotomy.

But really the outcome is probably gonna be about the same.

It's a nice method because it's non-invasive, but we need to find a new target for these conditions.

And because of the common denominator of

the urge despite the risk, sort of that compulsion.

Perhaps it could be the same target, I don't know.

But I would argue we need to do these modulatory experiments, either with a device or with invasive recordings to better understand where these problems are coming from, to define where we should do an ultrasound treatment.

There has been a revolution in America, it was in Europe before it was in America, where we would do stereoencephalography.

which is basically like doing an EEG of patients with epilepsy, but with invasive electrodes.

And we would place tiny little wires, less than a millimeter in diameter, all throughout the brain into parts of the brain that we believe are involved in seizures.

and we would admit the patients to the hospital and figure out where the seizures were starting and propagating.

And then we could stimulate these electrodes to see if there was a symptom that was important and try to identify a region that we thought we could either remove surgically, ablate with a laser or put a stimulator in it perhaps.

That's commonplace now for epilepsy.

And it works extremely well and it's very safe.

Of course, it's still a brain procedure, but the complication rate is surprisingly low, quite honestly, for the amount of electrodes that we place.

And it's extremely well tolerated.

Most of these patients leave the hospital and they don't even feel like they've had surgery.