Assessing heating distribution by therapeutic ultrasound on bone phantoms and in vitro human samples using infrared thermography.

Background: Bioheat models have been proposed to predict heat distribution in multilayered biological tissues after therapeutic ultrasound (TUS) stimulation. However, evidence on its therapeutic benefit is still controversial for many clinical conditions. The aim of this study was to evaluate and to compare the TUS heating distribution on commercially available bone phantoms and in vitro femur and tibia human samples, at 1 MHz and several ultrasonic pulse regimens, by means of a thermographic image processing technique.