Themed on Empowering Women Health through Technology, the World’s Third Multicenter Telemedicine Womb-preserving Campaign brought to a successful conclusion on March 7, 2022. The Campaign was co-hosted by State Key Laboratory of Ultrasound in Medicine and Engineering of China (SKLUME), National Engineering Research Center of Ultrasound Medicine of China (NERCUM) and the International Society of Minimally Invasive and Virtual Surgery (ISMIVS) in Liangjiang District, Chongqing, China, attracting 147 global HIFU centers to join online and together deliver HIFU treatment, a innovative noninvasive therapy, for women with uterine fibroids and/or adenomyosis. The Campaign also witnessed the world’s first trans-provincial HIFU surgery using 5G technology.

Prof. Lang Jinghe, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics in PUMC Hospital, addressed that the minimally invasive technology represented by high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has promoted the humanization and minimization of clinical surgery, unfolding a new prospect for modern medicine. For today’s surgical treatment, apart from the mission of removing the lesion, the awareness of “protecting patient’s body function” should be engraved in every doctor’s mind. 

Prof. David Cranston, the Associate Professor of Surgery in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences in the University of Oxford and President of ISMIVS, said that women who lose their uterus are not only deprived of the opportunity to become a mother, but also seriously harmed in both physical and mental ways. Compared to traditional surgical options, HIFU enjoys the same effectiveness, but with less damage to the uterus and is more conducive to post-operative pregnancy. HIFU is one of the most typical representative technologies and pioneers in the field of minimally invasive and noninvasive medicine.

As a saying advocated by the Chinese traditional culture goes “Don't overlook a good deed because of its insignificance while turn to an evil deed because of its triviality”, the minimally invasive and noninvasive treatment aims to minimize the medically induced harm to patients, perform local management with the principle of maximizing the integrity of tissues and organs, fully improve patient’s own resistance to disease, rebuild patient’s body function, and help them achieve a sound mind and body, which all in turn give minimally invasive and noninvasive medicine a deeper meaning that goes beyond medical treatment – a meaning in promoting human civilization.

Based on the principle that the high temperature produced by the sunlight focused under a magnifying glass can ignite a piece of paper, HIFU treatment uses the physical properties of ultrasound such as good tissue penetration and focusability to precisely focus numerous beams of low-intensity ultrasound emitted outside the body on target tissues, which amplifies the sound intensity of the focal point tens of thousands of times and instantly generates a high temperature of 65-100°C. Using the thermal effect, cavitation effect, mechanical effect and acoustic-chemical effect of focused ultrasound, the target tissues are irreversibly coagulated and necrotic to achieve the purpose of rapid and precise non-invasive treatment.