Microbubbles promise to enhance the efficiency of ultrasound-mediated drug delivery and gene therapy by taking advantage of artificial cavitation nuclei. The purpose of this study is to examine the ultrasound-induced hemolysis in the application of drug delivery in the presence of microbubbles. To achieve this goal, human red blood cells mixed with microbubbles were exposed to 1-MHz pulsed ultrasound. The hemolysis level was measured by a flow cytometry, and the cavitation dose was detected by a passive cavitation detecting system. The results demonstrate that larger cavitation dose would be generated with the increase of acoustic pressure, which might give rise to the enhancement of hemolysis. Besides the experimental observations, the acoustic pressure dependence of the radial oscillation of microbubble was theoretically estimated. The comparison between the experimental and calculation results indicates that the hemolysis should be highly correlated to the acoustic cavitation.
This article theoretically studies the influence of inhomogeneous abdominal walls on focused therapeutic ultrasound based on the phase screen model. An inhomogeneous tissue is considered as a combination of a homogeneous medium and a phase aberration screen. Variations of acoustic parameters such as peak positive pressure, peak negative pressure, and acoustic intensity are discussed with respect to the phase screen statistics of human abdominal walls. Results indicate that the abdominal wall can result in energy loss of the sound in the focal plane. For a typical human abdominal wall with correlation length of 7.9 mm and variance of 0.36, the peak acoustic intensity radiated from a 1MHz transmitter with a radius of 30 mm can be reduced by about 14% at the focal plane.
The difference-frequency （DF） ultrasound generated by using parametric effect promises to improve detection depth owing to its low attenuation, which is beneficial for deep tissue imaging. With ultrasound contrast agents infusion, the harmonic components scattered from the microbubbles, including DF, can be generated due to the nonlinear vibration. A theoretical study on the DF generation from microbubbles under the dual-frequency excitation is proposed in formula based on the solution of the RPNNP equation. The optimisation of the DF generation is discussed associated with the applied acoustic pressure, frequency, and the microbubble size. Experiments are performed to validate the theoretical predictions by using a dual-frequency signal to excite microbubbles. Both the numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the optimised DF ultrasound can be achieved as the difference frequency is close to the resonance frequency of the microbubble and improve the contrast-to-tissue ratio in imaging.
This article proposes a finite element model （FEM） for predicting the acoustic scattering from an encapsulated microbubble near rigid boundary. The validity of the model is first examined by comparing the acoustic nonlinear response of a free microbubble with that obtained by the Church model. Then this model is used to investigate the effect of the rigid boundary on acoustic scattering signals from microbubble. The results indicate that the resonance frequency decreases while the oscillation amplitude increases as the microbubble approaches the rigid boundary. In addition, the fundamental component of the acoustic scattering signal is enhanced compared with that of the free microbubble.
