Leiomyoma is a benign tumor that occurs in 80% of women before the age of 50. Surgical resection of the tumor or entire uterus carries the risk of infection and hemorrhage, as well as a long postoperative recovery period.

A more modern method, already available in clinical practice, includes non-invasive heating of the tumor and its thermal ablation using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). However, thermal ablation has some limitations, such as the need for expensive real-time MRI temperature monitoring, and reduction of the ablation accuracy due to the heat diffusion from the focus to the surrounding tissues.

An alternative method was proposed at LIMU termed boiling histotripsy which allows for non-invasive mechanical (i.e., non-thermal) fractionation of target tissue in the human body using HIFU shock-wave pulses. In the published paper, boiling histotripsy was used for the first time for non-invasive fractionation of human leiomyoma ex vivo (i.e., outside the body) under ultrasound imaging.

In the near future, in order to bring boiling histotripsy into clinical practice, optimization of protocols in laboratory experiments and further preclinical trials will be carried out.