Tandem shock wave cavitation enhancement for extracorporeal lithotripsy

Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) has been successful for more than twenty years in treating patients with kidney stones. Hundreds of underwater shock waves are generated outside the patient's body and focused on the kidney stone. Stones fracture mainly due to spalling, cavitation and layer separation. Cavitation bubbles are produced in the vicinity of the stone by the tensile phase of each shock wave. Bubbles expand, stabilize and finally collapse violently, creating stone-damaging secondary shock waves and microjets. Bubble collapse can be intensified by sending a second shock wave a few hundred microseconds after the first. A novel method of generating two piezoelectrically generated shock waves with an adjustable time delay between 50 and 950 micros is described and tested. The objective is to enhance cavitation-induced damage to kidney stones during ESWL in order to reduce treatment time. In vitro kidney stone model fragmentation efficiency and pressure measurements were compared with those for a standard ESWL system. Results indicate that fragmentation efficiency was significantly enhanced at a shock wave delay of about 400 and 250 micros using rectangular and spherical stone phantoms, respectively. The system presented here could be installed in clinical devices at relatively low cost, without the need for a second shock wave generator.