At high intensity levels, ultrasound energy focused into remote tissue targets in human body has shown to produce thermal necrosis in circumscribed regions with sub-millimeter accuracy. The non-invasive modality known as HIFU has enormous potential for thermal ablation of cancers/tumors of the human body without any adverse effects in the surrounding normal tissue. In this paper, empirical results for parametric assessment and interdependence of several exposure variables are presented for producing thermal necrosis as well as hemostasis. Multiple HIFU transducers in selective spatial configuration have been deployed using a suitably designed experiemntal harness, with and without motorized jig scanning. The pre-planning and on-line procedure for treatment and specified instrumentation is described. Custom designed 25mm aperture HIFU probes resonating at 2 MHz focused at 64 and 80 mm are used. Results have been obtained in ex-vivo animal tissue and in vitro biological phantoms for hemostasis.

Date Published: 10 June 2003
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4954, Thermal Treatment of Tissue: Energy Delivery and Assessment II, (10 June 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.476569

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4954:
Thermal Treatment of Tissue: Energy Delivery and Assessment II
Thomas P. Ryan, Editor(s)