Case Studies

High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU), used with imaging techniques, is a promising new treatment of prostate cancer and brain disorders. It focuses multiple high energy soundwaves onto a single spot, generating enough heat to destroy a tumour. Unlike ionising radiation, these beams do not cause long term harm to DNA, and in...

For many years molecular radiotherapy, MRT, has been used for palliative cancer care, but it has great potential to become a potent first line cancer treatment. The therapy uses radioactive drugs to target specific tumours, for example radioactive yittrium-90 microspheres are used to treat liver cancers. However, accurate acti...

Hearing defects in a child’s early years leads to language development problems, so national health authorities run programmes to identify affected babies and young children. Testing uses small headsets to provide a known sound stimulation, then measures the response in the infant’s ear or brain. The small headsets currently u...

Radiotherapy has been a mainstay of cancer treatment for over a century. It most commonly involves using a linear accelerator (linac) to deliver high-energy beams of X-ray radiation to patients, killing cancerous cells by damaging their DNA. Prior to treatment, patients are imaged in a CT scanner (using X-rays) to identify the ...

Treating cancerous tumours with radiotherapy requires precisely targeted treatments to be delivered directly to the cancerous cells without harming surrounding healthy tissue. For example with facilities like gamma knife, up to 200 low power beams, which individually do little harm can be focused to a single area of just a few ...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in diagnosing conditions such as joint, spine and tissue problems, as well as various cancers. Thirty million patients in the EU undergo MRI exams each year. However, 8–10% of the European population have metal implants meaning that additional precautions have to be taken to e...