A Metric and Method for Calculating Energy-Preserving Spatiotemporal Cavitation Dose: Cavitational Radiated Energy...

Area of Science:

• Acoustics
• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Passive Acoustic Mapping (PAM) is crucial for monitoring therapeutic ultrasound treatments involving cavitation.
• Accurate quantification of cavitation energy is essential for assessing treatment safety and efficacy.
• Existing PAM methods face challenges in energy preservation and device independence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop methods for measuring and reporting spatio-temporally varying cavitation energies.
• To ensure these methods are energy-preserving, device-independent, and normalized to affected tissue volume.
• To introduce a novel PAM algorithm for improved accuracy and reliability.

Main Methods:

• Introduced cavitational radiated energy density (CRED) as a new metric.
• Identified image blurring from point spread functions as a source of error in conventional beamformers.
• Developed a novel PAM algorithm using Lucy-Richardson deconvolution (LRD) to correct for the point spread function.

Main Results:

• The LRD-PAM algorithm significantly reduces image artefacts and improves energy estimates.
• CRED provides a quantitative measure of cavitation energy.
• Simulations and experiments demonstrated improved cavitation maps with reduced tail artefacts.

Conclusions:

• CRED is a quantitatively significant metric for cavitation energy.
• The LRD-PAM algorithm enables energy-preserving, quantitative, real-time monitoring of cavitation-based therapies.
• This approach is independent of the specific instrumentation employed.