Multi-frequency therapeutic ultrasound: A review

Focused ultrasound is a noninvasive, radiation-free and real-time therapeutic approach to treat deep-seated targets, which benefits numerous diseases otherwise requiring surgeries. Treatment efficiency is one of the key factors determining therapeutic outcomes, but improving it solely by increasing the total power can be limited by the performance of general ultrasound devices. To address this, multi-frequency therapeutic ultrasound, using additional ultrasound waves of different frequencies on top of the standard single-frequency wave, provides a promising method for treatment efficiency enhancement with limited power. Several applications and numerical works have demonstrated its superiority on treatment enhancement. This paper presents an overview of the mechanisms, implementations, applications and decisive parameters of the multi-frequency therapeutic ultrasound, which could help to pave the way for better understanding and further developing this technology in the future.