Page 10 - Volume 8, Issue 4 - Winter 2012

FROM THE EDITOR
Dick Stern
Acoustical Society of America Suite 1N01
2 Huntington Quadrangle Melville, New York 11747-4502
This is a very special issue of Acoustics Today. It is the first issue totally devoted to Medical Ultrasound. Vera Khokhlova, the guest editor, did a fantastic job of organizing the issue and encouraging the authors to keep their articles simple, inter- esting, and very readable. They have done so and there is much to read and to learn. If you do research in the field or are just interested in finding out what the field is about, this is your issue. Enjoy.
Dick Stern
FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
Vera Khokhlova
Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound Applied Physics Laboratory University of Washington
Seattle, Washington 98105
and
Department of Acoustics, Physics Faculty Moscow State University
Moscow 119991, Russia
ULTRASOUND PROMISES REVOLUTIONARY ADVANCES IN MEDICINE
deep penetration of ultrasound in tissue. In multimodal systems, in addition to anatomic information of the convention- al ultrasound image, embedded photoa- coustic images give physiological and bio- chemical information of tissues, thus improving medical diagnostics.
In therapeutic applications, nonin- vasive ultrasound surgery or HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) technology is emerging from laboratory experiments and bioengineering studies toward exciting (and revolutionary) clin- ical applications. HIFU treatments vary from transcutaneous ablation of benign
The latest decade has been an exciting time in developing medical ultrasound both for diagnostic imaging and for ther- apeutic applications. In diagnostics, besides advances in conventional imaging modalities, a promising development is to combine the relative advantages of differ- ent physical technologies to get additional information about the tissues of interest. One example of such synergistic approaches that is presented in the cur- rent issue is “photoacoustic imaging,” This hybrid imaging method combines ultra- sound and optical waves, taking advan- tage of the high optical contrast and the
6 Acoustics Today, October 2012