Miniaturized ultrasound arrays for interstitial ablation and imaging.

A potential alternative to extracorporeal, noninvasive HIFU therapy is minimally invasive intense ultrasound ablation that can be performed laparoscopically or percutaneously. An approach to minimally invasive ablation of soft tissue using miniaturized linear ultrasound arrays is presented here. Recently developed 32-element arrays with aperture 2.

Bulk ablation of soft tissue with intense ultrasound: modeling and experiments.

Methods for the bulk ablation of soft tissue using intense ultrasound, with potential applications in the thermal treatment of focal tumors, are presented. An approximate analytic model for bulk ablation predicts the progress of ablation based on tissue properties, spatially averaged ultrasonic heat deposition, and perfusion. The approximate model allows the prediction of threshold acoustic powers required for ablation in vivo as well as the comparison of cases with different starting temperatures and perfusion characteristics, such as typical in vivo and ex vivo experiments.