Focused ultrasound as an emerging therapy for neuropsychiatric disease: Historical perspectives and a review of current clinical data

Psychiatric disorders are a common source of disease morbidity with high rates of refractoriness to first‐line treatments. As such, many have investigated the utility of neurosurgical interventions for treatment‐resistant forms of these conditions. More recently among these, functional neurosurgical techniques using high‐ and low‐intensity focused ultrasound (FUS) have emerged as promising options in this arena, largely due to their minimally‐invasive nature and encouraging early safety and efficacy data. Existing clinical data have thus far demonstrated FUS to be a potentially useful intervention for treatment‐refractory forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, various anxiety disorders, substance‐use disorder, and schizophrenia. This report presents a comprehensive review of existing clinical trial data, summarizing key findings, study specifications, and providing critical analysis. In addition to giving the most complete summary of modern clinical research on this topic to date, this report characterizes the current state of this body of literature using bibliometric analysis, succinctly highlighting the most investigated topics and the most promising areas of modern investigation. Based on our review of the literature, current work on this topic is highly heterogeneous with regard to specific treatment protocols and anatomic targets for FUS – targeting multiple nuclei at a wide variety of intensities. We recommend that future studies aim to clarify more precise therapeutic targets and specific treatment protocols which optimize the efficacy of these techniques.