Dr. Zhen Xu explains that building histotripsy equipment required solving a specific engineering problem: generating microsecond-long ultrasound pulses at very high instantaneous pressure, while keeping cumulative power low to avoid heating and to maximize controlled cavitation. No existing ultrasound equipment could do this, so her lab had to build specialized systems, roughly 100 times higher in power and pressure than standard imaging ultrasound. She contrasts this custom research hardware with Edison, the commercial clinical system built by HistoSonics, and describes founding a Histotripsy Center at the University of Michigan that gives other researchers free access to equipment and technical expertise, including shipping systems to outside labs, to speed up research and eventual treatment of other diseases.
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Xu says the specialized pulses need roughly 100 times higher power and pressure than a standard ultrasound imaging system.
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She frames the free equipment access as a deliberate choice to prioritize patient impact and faster clinical translation over commercial sale of research systems.
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She mentions receiving emails daily from patients asking about treatment, which she cites as motivation for opening up the technology to more researchers.
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She notes histotripsy could potentially be extended to treat other diseases, including performing precise surgery through the skull for brain disease.
549 words · auto-generated from the episode video
18:14the mechanism. Yeah, actually one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was like, you know, the grad students in your lab today, because histotripsy has become such a flourishing field, there's probably like custom equipment that now manufacturers build specifically for these types of experiments, right? But at the time, as you were saying, like you had to build custom ultrasound equipment. Was it the power? And like the fact that these waveforms, you have to like fit the waveforms into this Gaussian envelope that repeats every whatever? It was actually turned out, it was that, you know, because we need required microsecond, very short courses at a really high instantaneous pressure,
18:59just for that microsecond pulse. Like I said that you can't even ring up to the full amputee. But you could wait for a long time for the next pulse to come. So the cumulative power is actually low. We actually intentionally make it low so that we can avoid heating. We want to maximize the cavitation effects and also control it. So we need to build a specialized ultrasound equipment to produce microseconds ultrasound pulse like an imaging system, but with like 100 times higher power, higher pressure. So that's kind of the challenge because nobody had a need for that
19:40before. And it's a new kind of need. That's why a specialized equipment has to be developed for that special purposes. And then now, even nowadays, there is a commercial, it's a clinical system, which is this Edison system produced by HistoSonics for patient treatment. But the research equipment are still in a build and develop in our own lab. And that's why it's harder for other researchers to do this research. And that's why recently I established this histotripsy center at University of Michigan,
20:20and to really enable the researchers to do histotripsy work by opening up and provide access to those equipment that we build and also technical expertise entirely free. So people who want to investigate histotripsy for new disease treatment or combined with drugs, they can just come in and use the equipment for free. And we can even ship a system out to other people to do those work also for free. Yeah, that's pretty incredible actually. You could have made a nice buck with that if you didn't do it for free.
21:03Well, my intention, research is a solid foundation to enable more clinical translation, like commercialization. And my intention is that I have seen histotripsy is a platform technology that can be used to treat many new disease, including different type of cancer and even brain disease. So we can actually treat through the skull to do precise non-invasive surgery. So it's really incredible. And I have received emails from patients every single day and they ask, why can
21:45I actually get the treatment? I have all different disease. So my hope is by opening up to enable thousands of researchers to do this, we can quickly get more results to enable clinical translation so that we can help as many patients as fast as possible. And that's the impact I want to make rather than just trying to sell the system to the researchers. I want to mobilize and just go to patients.