Monitoring high-intensity focused ultrasound thermal therapy by ultrasound doppler imaging using twinkling artifact

High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive therapeutic modality that uses high-energy acoustic waves to thermally coagulate tissue at the focal region. The Twinkling Artifact (TA) is a color Doppler artifact caused by the acoustic radiation force and the consequent tissue vibration during Doppler imaging. This paper aims to employ TA for real-time detection and monitoring of HIFU-induced lesions. A dataset gathered in a previous study concerning ex vivo porcine tissue samples was used, in which the real-time backscattered radiofrequency signals were acquired before, during, and after HIFU treatment. To investigate the presence of TA in Doppler images, the amplitude of each pixel is considered in the sequence of frames as time-series or slow-time signals. It is shown that the main frequency of slow-time signals represents the Doppler frequency shift. Doppler images were constructed using the maximum frequency from every 10-sample slow-time signal. By constructing Doppler images, the frequency shifts within tissue during HIFU treatment were visually and analytically assessed. Our frequency analysis of RF data confirmed the occurrence of TA during HIFU exposure. Furthermore, a novel method was developed for lesion formation monitoring, with less than a 5% error rate in depth and width measurements for depicting coagulated tissue dimensions.