Dr. Zhen Xu recounts how histotripsy began as her PhD dissertation project at the University of Michigan, under advisor Charles Cain, after pediatric cardiologist Dr. Achi Ludomirsky described operating on very sick babies with congenital heart disease who sometimes died on the surgical table, and asked if a noninvasive way to perform real surgery, removing tissue rather than just heating it, could be invented. She distinguishes this goal from existing high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), which only thermally cooks tissue without removing it, framing the unmet need that led her, as a first-year PhD student with no prior expertise, to take on the challenge.
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Xu started her PhD in biomedical engineering in 2001, meaning the challenge was posed to her in her first year.
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She describes herself as young and naive with nothing to lose, which is why she took on a problem she had no idea how to solve.
431 words · auto-generated from the episode video
0:51you've had an incredible career with histotripsy. It's something that you kind of started before we get into some of the later stages where now you've co-founded a company and you're doing all these amazing things. You were once a grad student in the University of Michigan. So I wanted to start there because I think that's really the genesis of this story and also why you're getting this award. It was in the 2000s and you were under Charles Cain at the University of Michigan. And someone had asked if there's a way to use ultrasound to make surgery like manipulations inside tissue without actually doing the invasive stuff that
1:33comes with it. Did he just put this on your desk one day or how did you get involved with it as a grad student? Yeah. So in 2001, I came to the United States to do graduate study in biomedical engineering. And so I was a first year PhD student. Yeah. And Dr. Achi Ludomirsky, so he is a pediatric cardiologist. So he just came to the lab meeting one day and he was telling us how he was operating on patients and their babies, very young kids with congenital heart disease, very sick. And he actually operated on their heart and they would
2:19die on the surgical table. So that he asked, can you invent a technology that can perform the real surgery without incision? And he emphasized on real surgery because there was radiation and there was a different form of ablation technology, which means that you use different energy, microwave, radio frequency, even ultrasound laser to heat up the target tissue and the thermally heal the tissue, but you don't remove anything. So it's no use to him. And then in order to save his patients, he need to do the
3:01real surgery and there was no way of doing it. And then he posed that as a challenge to the group. And I was a very young and naive student and I was so inspired by him. So after Dr. Ludomirsky left, I went to my PhD mentor, Charles Cain, and said, I wonder that to be my PhD dissertation. I had no clue how to do it, but that just sounds so inspiring. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely something a first year PhD student would do. I had nothing to lose. I was young. Like if you're like four or five years in, you're like, maybe I'll just try and graduate. Okay. And I had no clue. Yeah. And there were already previous technologies that