The interaction of shockwaves with a vapour bubble in boiling histotripsy: The shock scattering effect

Cited 17 time in webofscience Cited 7 time in scopus
  • Hit : 218
  • Download : 503
Boiling histotripsy is a High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) technique which uses a number of short pulses with high acoustic pressures at the HIFU focus to induce mechanical tissue fractionation. In boiling histotripsy, two different types of acoustic cavitation contribute towards mechanical tissue destruction: a boiling vapour bubble and cavitation clouds. An understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these phenomena and their dynamics is therefore paramount to predicting and controlling the overall size of a lesion produced for a given boiling histotripsy exposure condition. A number of studies have shown the effects of shockwave heating in generating a boiling bubble at the HIFU focus and have studied its dynamics under boiling histotripsy insonation. However, not much is known about the subsequent production of cavitation clouds that form between the HIFU transducer and the boiling bubble. The main objective of the present study is to examine what causes this bubble cluster formation after the generation of a boiling vapour bubble. A numerical simulation of 2D nonlinear wave propagation with the presence of a bubble at the focus of a HIFU field was performed using the k-Wave MATLAB toolbox for time domain ultrasound simulations, which numerically solves the generalised Westervelt equation. The numerical results clearly demonstrate the appearance of the constructive interference of a backscattered shockwave by a bubble with incoming incident shockwaves. This interaction (i.e., the reflected and inverted peak positive phase from the bubble with the incoming incident rarefactional phase) can eventually induce a greater peak negative pressure field compared to that without the bubble at the HIFU focus. In addition, the backscattered peak negative pressure magnitude gradually increased from 17.4 MPa to 31.6 MPa when increasing the bubble size from 0.2 mm to 1.5 mm. The latter value is above the intrinsic cavitation threshold of -28 MPa in soft tissue. Our results suggest that the formation of a cavitation cloud in boiling histotripsy is a threshold effect which primarily depends (a) the size and location of a boiling bubble, and (b) the sum of the incident field and that scattered by a bubble.
Publisher
ELSEVIER
Issue Date
2021-01
Language
English
Article Type
Article
Citation

ULTRASONICS SONOCHEMISTRY, v.70

ISSN
1350-4177
DOI
10.1016/j.ultsonch.2020.105312
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10203/280016
Appears in Collection
Files in This Item
1-s2.0-S1350417720303965-main.pdf(32.22 MB)Download
This item is cited by other documents in WoS
⊙ Detail Information in WoSⓡ Click to see webofscience_button
⊙ Cited 17 items in WoS Click to see citing articles in records_button

qr_code

  • mendeley

    citeulike


rss_1.0 rss_2.0 atom_1.0