Newswise — The Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation is delighted to announce the election of Steve Rusckowski to its Board of Directors.
Mr. Rusckowski became the Executive Vice-President and Chief Executive Officer of Philips Healthcare in November, 2006, and has been a member of the Philips Board of Management since April 2007. He was previously the CEO of the Imaging Systems business group of Philips Healthcare.
Before joining Philips, Mr. Rusckowski held numerous management positions with the healthcare division of Hewlett-Packard/Agilent Technologies. He was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Agilent’s Healthcare Solutions Group when Philips acquired this business in 2001. Mr. Rusckowski was born in 1957 in the United States and holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Masters in management science from M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.
“Steve is a great addition to the Foundation's board,” comments Neal F. Kassell, M.D., Founder and Chairman of the Foundation and Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia. “He is a leading figure in the medical device industry and has 25 years of experience in introducing ground breaking innovations to the medical community. Philips Healthcare is widely recognized for its high quality technology and has made a major commitment to MR-guided Focused Ultrasound. Steve will represent a key stakeholder in this exciting field, which we believe has the potential to revolutionize therapy and improve the lives of millions of patients.”
“I am pleased to be part of the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation,” comments Steve Rusckowski. “The Foundation has become a driving force in advancing the field of MR-guided Focused Ultrasound, and I look forward to contributing to the Foundation's goal of rapidly moving the technology from the laboratory to widespread clinical use."
The other members of the Foundation Board of Directors are Dorothy Batten; S. Morry Blumenfeld, Ph.D., Founding Partner of Meditech Advisors Management; Eugene V. Fife, Chairman of Eclipsys Corporation; best-selling author John Grisham; David Heller, Chairman of Advisory Research Inc.; Dan Jordan, former President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation; Neal F. Kassell, M.D., Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia; and Kobi Vortman, Ph.D., CEO of InSightec.
About the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation
The Charlottesville based Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation’s mission is to develop new applications for, and to accelerate the worldwide adoption of Focused Ultrasound.
The Foundation’s activities include: funding translational and clinical research, providing fellowships for training physicians and scientists, hosting symposia and workshops, maintaining online informational resources, and establishing new centers of excellence.
Support for the Foundation comes from corporate and private philanthropic sources.
For more information please visit www.fusfoundation.org
Focused Ultrasound
Focused ultrasound is a breakthrough or game-changing technology that is poised to revolutionize the treatment of a variety of medical disorders by serving as the ultimate in minimally invasive surgery; an alternative to radiation therapy; the means for precisely delivering drugs in high concentration just to the point in the body where they are needed, thus avoiding systemic side effects; and dissolving blood clots to restore circulation. Focused ultrasound holds the potential to noninvasively treat brain, breast, prostate, liver and other benign and malignant tumors; to convert metastatic cancer from a lethal disease to a chronic, manageable disorder; to reverse the disabling and life threatening neurological deficits from stroke; to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and chronic pain; and to address a host of other disorders ranging from heart disease to diabetes. The procedure can be performed on an outpatient basis, does not require general anesthesia or incisions, results in minimal discomfort and few complications, and allows for rapid recovery. Focused ultrasound is the result of the integration of two technologies: high intensity focused ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. Focused ultrasound technology is analogous to using a magnifying glass to focus multiple beams of light on a point and burn a hole in a leaf. With focused ultrasound, multiple intersecting beams of ultrasound energy are focused with extreme accuracy on a target deep in the body as small as a grain of rice.
Where each individual ultrasound beam passes through the tissue, there is no effect. But where the beams intersect in the body, the focused energy has a cumulative effect, enabling precise heating and ablation of tissue, highly targeted drug delivery, or liquefaction of blood clots. Magnetic resonance imaging is used to visualize normal anatomy and abnormal structures within the body, to localize the tissue to be treated, to guide and control the treatment interactively in real time, and to evaluate the effectiveness of therapy.
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