Micro-bubble enhanced HIFU

High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatment that employs microbubbles to provide enhanced heating has been investigated in order to develop a less invasive and more rapid tumor ablation therapy. It has been demonstrated that microbubbles have significant effects on heating enhancement in vitro and in vivo experiments, however ultrasound propagation could be disturbed when there are too many microbubbles between the transducer and the focus. In this study, we develop a method to make a clear pass way for obtaining enhanced heating by using microbubbles just at the focus, thus avoiding heating on the pass way from the transducer to the target region. In this method, microbubbles are destroyed in front of the HIFU focus (on the transducer side) by irradiating a intense burst wave of microsecond order, before irradiating the ultrasound waves for heating the target region. The experiment is conducted in a medium of a polyacrylamide gel containing microbubbles, and a temperature-sensing liquid crystal sheet is set in the focus to observe the temperature distribution. The ultrasound frequency was 2.2 MHz and the intensity was 5000 W/cm2, and 20 burst waves were irradiated at pulse repetition frequency of 1 kHz. The number of wave pulses was varied. The continuous-wave frequency, intensity and irradiation time are 2.2 MHz, 1000 W/cm2 and 60 sec, respectively. As the number of pulses increased, the heating region moves from the transducer side to the focus. This is because microbubbles in front of the focus are destroyed and the ultrasound propagates around the target position effectively. These results suggest that the microbubble distribution and the heating position in the developed HIFU system can be controlled.