Effects of acoustic insonation parameters on ultrasound contrast agent destruction

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) are used to enhance the acoustic backscattered intensity of blood and thereby assist the assessment of blood perfusion. Characterization of UCA destruction provides important information for the design of contrast-assisted perfusion imaging. High-speed optical observation of single microbubble destruction during acoustic insonation has been performed in previous studies. The results identified that pressure, center frequency and transmission phase have significant effects on the fragmentation threshold. We proposed an acoustic-based experiment method to demonstrate the relationship between different acoustic exposure conditions and the degree of UCA destruction. The method also provides a simple and convenient way to determine the microbubble destruction threshold. The experiments introduced three insonation parameters, including acoustic pressure (0 to 1 MPa), pulse frequency (1, 2.25, 5 and 7.5 MHz) and pulse length (1 to 10 cycles). The term of surviving percentage (SP) was proposed to represent the ratio of UCA backscattered power with and without acoustic insonation. The results showed that the SP decreased with decreasing pulse frequency, but with increasing transmission acoustic pressure and pulse length. In addition, there was an exponential relationship between SP and acoustic pressure, and thus the UCA destruction pressure threshold could be predicted from the fitted exponential curve. The results also show that the degree of UCA destruction was not related to mechanical index (MI). Potential applications of this method include UCA high-resolution destruction/replenishment imaging model, microbubble cavitation, sonoporation in drug delivery and gene therapy.