Strategy of high efficiency and refined high-intensity focused ultrasound and ultrasound monitoring imaging of thermal lesion and cavitation

We proposed that high efficiency high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) could be achieved by using a splitting transducer with various frequencies and focusing patterns, and explored the feasibility of using ultrafast active cavitation imaging (UACI), pulse inversion (PI) sub-harmonic cavitation imaging and bubble wavelet transform imaging for monitoring of cavitation during HIFU, as well as the ultrasonic B-mode images, differential integrated backscatter (IBS) images, Nakagami images and elastography for monitoring HIFU-induced lesion. The use of HIFU splitting transducer had the potential to increase the size of the thermal lesion in a shorter duration and may improve the ablation efficiency of HIFU and would shorten the exposure duration significantly. The spatial-temporal evolution of residual cavitation bubbles at the tissue-water interface was obtained by UACI and the results showed that the UACI had a frame rate high enough to capture the transient behavior of the cavitation bubbles. The experiments demonstrated that comparing with normal sub-harmonic and PI harmonic images, PI sub-harmonic images had higher sensitivity and CTR, which was conducive to showing cavitation bubbles. The CTR would be further improved by combining PI ultrafast plane wave transmitting with cavitation bubble wavelet transform.