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Uterine Fibroids are quite common in women. Would be in men as well if they had an uterus... hehe. They are lumps of muscle that often grow during pregnancy. They are not bad for you unless they grow to big and/or grow in a bad place. Then they can cause infertility among other symtoms.

A very cool way of removing (or at least shrinking significantly) is the use of focused ultrasound guided by Magnet camera (MRi). No operation required! So there is no need to cut the stomach open and being operated on. Recovery time from abdominal surgery is quite long and there are operative injuries as well.

To "operate" without opening the abdomen is truly Sci-Fi :)

Here is a video with some facts and figures on uterine fibroids. It's 10 minutes of statistics basically... but interesting in the beginning.

Vimeo Video on Fibroids

Here is a promovideo from InSightec a company making one of the machines. It IS cool that there seems to be even more applications than blasting away uterine fibroids. Breast lumps, prostate cancer and even brain tumors.

And I can't help but to think of the Sonic Tanks that you could build in the awesome game I mentioned last post, Dune II! I found this nice image from the German version of the game.