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Essential tremor affects 10 to 20 million 
Americans. It can become very disabling.

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People call us from all over the world 
because they've been dealing with tremor for  

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decades or sometimes all their life. And we 
can sometimes stop it really within minutes.  

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So, when I was probably around 50-51 I 
started noticing the tremor. You know  

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I have to try to do everything with one hand 
because my right hand I can't do much with it.  

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My doctor mentioned to me that there was an 
ultrasound treatment here in Charlottesville.  

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There have been treatments but these were open surgeries 
that involved drilling a hole in the skull to  

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insert an electrode. Beginning around 
2010 UVA gained access to this focused  

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ultrasound technology and the real advance 
here is the ability to do the treatment  

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without any incision while someone's wide awake to 
confirm and validate that we've done the treatment. 

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Hoping that i'll live a more normal life. Like I said 
there's just so many things I can't do. People come  

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in on the day of the procedure to this facility. We 
conduct one final baseline test of their tremor.  

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Once we have the patient prepared we take 
them into the MRI room, we focus the ultrasound  

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transducer exactly where we want it based on the 
MRI. It has 1,024 individual ultrasound elements  

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that are all computer controlled. We can bring 
all those thousand beams into an extremely sharp  

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focus deep inside of the brain within a millimeter 
or so. We'll prescribe a small dose of ultrasound  

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and then we go check the patient and their 
clinical function and if everything looks good  

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we repeat it and we tiptoe it up 
until their tremor's safely gone.

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How about straight out?

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How about, yeah.

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How about straight up?

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Touch my finger. And then your chin.

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It's awesome. I haven't done that in a long 
time. Really each case is a thrill and it  

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never gets old. This whole event 
has been very gratifying. It led to  

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kind of a worldwide approval and acceptance 
of the technology. So, it really paved the way  

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for thinking about ultrasound technology 
for neurologic and psychiatric disorders.