Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute is marking a milestone: Its 100th HiFU (High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound ) procedure. HiFU offers an incisionless outpatient procedure for patients with essential tremor or Parkinson’s disease who don’t get acceptable tremor relief from medications.

“It's super exciting that we're able to provide this service for this many people,” said Justin Sporrer, M.D., neurosurgeon and director of functional neurosurgery at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute. “It is a large number and we're proud of that milestone. But, at the same time, I'm looking forward to the future. There's 10 million people in this country with tremor, and a lot of them don't know about this yet, and so I think that there is enormous potential to treat this population.”

This procedure is performed on appropriate patients who have abnormal electrical activity deep in the brain causing essential tremors. HiFU directs more than 1,000 beams of ultrasound waves through the skull and directly to the problem area with extreme precision. The combined energy of these sound waves increases significantly where they meet, enabling them to stun and destroy lesions that are disrupting the normal circuitry of the brain and causing the abnormal electrical activity.