Acoustic cavitation emission feedback to monitor tissue fractionation during histotripsy therapy

摘要

Histotripsy uses high-pressure, microsecond-long ultrasound pulses to generate a cloud of cavitation to fractionate cells in target tissues such as tumors, blood clots and brain applications. B-mode ultrasound has been used to detect the cavitation and tissue fractionation generated by histotripsy, but it requires a separate imaging probe and can only detect substantial amounts of tissue fractionation. In this study, a specialized circuit and digitizer was designed to allow all the elements of a 112-element array to transmit extremely high-pressure (>40MPa) histotripsy pulses and receive the low-pressure Acoustic Cavitation Emission (ACE) signals. ACE feedback can be achieved via the histotripsy array itself and may have a high sensitivity to detect tissue fractionation.