High intensity focused ultrasound（HIFU） has shown a great promise in noninvasive cancer therapy. The impact of acoustic cavitation on the lesion formation induced by HIFU is investigated both experimentally and theoretically in transparent protein-containing gel and ex vivo liver tissue samples. A numerical model that accounts for nonlinear acoustic propagation and heat transfer is used to simulate the lesion formation induced by the thermal effect. The results showed that lesions could be induced in the samples exposed to HIFU with various acoustic pressures and pulse lengths. The measured areas of lesions formed in the lateral direction were comparable to the simulated results, while much larger discrepancy was observed between the experimental and simulated data for the areas of longitudinal lesion cross-section. Meanwhile,a series of stripe-wiped-off B-mode pictures were obtained by using a special imaging processing method so that HIFUinduced cavitation bubble activities could be monitored in real-time and quantitatively analyzed as the functions of acoustic pressure and pulse length. The results indicated that, unlike the lateral area of HIFU-induced lesion that was less affected by the cavitation activity, the longitudinal cross-section of HIFU-induced lesion was significantly influenced by the generation of cavitation bubbles through the temperature elevation resulting from HIFU exposures. Therefore, considering the clinical safety in HIFU treatments, more attention should be paid on the lesion formation in the longitudinal direction to avoid uncontrollable variation resulting from HIFU-induced cavitation activity.
The influence of the inhomogeneous tissue layer on the generation of acoustic vortices （AV） is studied theoretically and experimentally based on the phase screen model. By considering the time-shift of a random phase screen, the formula of acoustic pressure for the AV beam generated by a circular array of eight planar piston sources is derived. With the actual correlation length of the abdominal wall, numerical simulations before and after the insertion of the inhomogeneous tissue layer are conducted, and also demonstrated by experimental measurements. It is proved that, when the thickness variation of the phase screen is less than one wavelength, no significant influence on the generation of AVs can be produced. The variations of vortex nodes and antinodes in terms of the location, shape, and size of AVs are not obvious. Although the circular pressure distribution might be deformed by the phase interference with a larger thickness variation, AVs can still be generated around the center axis with perfect phase spirals in a reduced effective radius. The favorable results provide the feasibility of AV generation inside the human body and suggest the application potential of AVs in object manipulation for biomedical engineering.
Sub-harmonic component generated from microbubbles is proven to be potentially used in noninvasive blood pressure measurement. Both theoretical and experimental studies are performed in the present work to investigate the dependence of the sub-harmonic generation on the overpressure with different excitation pressure amplitudes and pulse lengths. With 4-MHz ultrasound excitation at an applied acoustic pressure amplitude of 0.24 MPa, the measured sub-harmonic amplitude exhibits a decreasing change as overpressure increases; while non-monotonic change is observed for the applied acoustic pressures of 0.36 MPa and 0.48 MPa, and the peak position in the curve of the sub-harmonic response versus the overpres- sure shifts toward higher overpressure as the excitation pressure amplitude increases. Furthermore, the exciting pulse with long duration could lead to a better sensitivity of the sub-harmonic response to overpressure. The measured results are ex- plained by the numerical simulations based on the Marmottant model. The numerical simulations qualitatively accord with the measured results. This work might provide a preliminary proof for the optimization of the noninvasive blood pressure measurement through using sub-harmonic generation from microbubbles.
Exploring new acoustic parameters is essential to develop a noninvasive imaging technique for the surgery of silicone oil tamponades. In this study, the acoustic nonlinearity parameters B/A of varied silicone oil samples （e.g., linear or hyper-branched） are experimentally measured by using a modified thermodynamic method. The results show that： （i） when the concentration of the silicone oil with a molecular weight of 5 × 10^4 increases from 0.5 g/100 ml to 8 g/100 ml, the corresponding B/A value increases by about 18%, but the acoustic velocity only increases by about 0.1%; （ii） when the molecular weight of the hyper-branched silicone oil is enhanced from 2 × 10^5 to 1 × 10^6, the B/A value increases by about 22%, while the acoustic velocity is only raised by about 0.2%. This study suggests that the B/A parameter of the silicone oil is more sensitive to the change in its molecular structure than that of the acoustic velocity. Thus, the B/A parameter might be utilized as an effective index for the development and optimization of the noninvasive imaging of the surgery of silicone oil tamponades.
