The International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound (ISTU) is a non-profit organization founded in 2001 to increase and diffuse knowledge of therapeutic ultrasound to the scientific and medical community, and to facilitate the translation of therapeutic ultrasound techniques into the clinical arena for the benefit of patients worldwide.

The discovery by Frank and William Fry in the early 1950's that high-frequency sound waves could be used to generate 'trackless', localized tissue damage greatly predated even the use of ultrasound as a diagnostic modality. However, the rapid advances in ultrasound, magnetic-resonance and computer tomography imaging over the last three decades have now provided the tools to make truly non-invasive, image-guided ultrasound therapy a clinical reality. In recent years, exposure of tissue to therapeutic levels of ultrasound has been shown to result in a rapidly expanding array of desirable biological effects, ranging from fast localized heating and tissue necrosis, to vascular occlusion, disruption of the blood-brain barrier, the activation of drugs and the increased permeability of cell membranes to molecules. As a result, the future of therapeutic ultrasound relies increasingly on engineers, physicists, clinicians, biologists and biochemists working together to identify and understand how to optimally deliver acoustic energy for specific applications.