High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is one of the noninvasive treatment for tumors. Visualizing the treated area inside the human body is necessary to control the HIFU exposure. Localized motion imaging (LMI) using ultrasound to induce and detect tissue deformation is one technique to detect a change in tissue stiffness caused by thermal coagulation. In experiments with porcine liver, LMI has shown to detect deformation with less than 20% accuracy. We have developed a prototype feedback control system using real-time LMI. In this system, coagulation size was measured every 1 s and controlled to correspond to a targeted size. The typical size error was reduced to 14% from 35%. LMI displacements in normal and coagulated tissues were sufficiently different to discriminate between coagulated areas and noncoagulated ones after HIFU sonication and to visualize treated areas after HIFU treatment.
Recently, in the treatment of diseases such as cancer, noninvasive or low-invasive modality, such as high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), has been put into practice as an alternative to open surgery. HIFU induces thermal ablation of the target tissue to be treated. To improve the efficiency of HIFU, we have proposed a “triggered-HIFU” technique, which uses the combination of a short-duration, high-voltage transmission and a long-duration, medium-voltage transmission. In this method, the transmission device must endure high peak voltage for the former and the high time-average power for the latter. The triggered-HIFU sequence requires electronic scanning of the HIFU focus to maximize its thermal efficiency. Therefore, the transmission device must drive an array transducer with the number of elements on the order of a hundred or more, which requires that each part of the device that drives each element must be compact. The purpose of this work is to propose and construct such a transmission device by improving the staircase drive circuit, which we previously proposed. The main point of improvement is that both N and P MOSFETs are provided for each staircase voltage level instead of only one of them. Compared with the previous ultrasonic transmission circuit, high-voltage spikes were significantly reduced, the power consumption was decreased by 26.7%, and the transmission circuit temperature rise was decreased by 14.5 °C in the triggered-HIFU heating mode.
Visualizing an area subjected to high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) therapy is necessary for controlling the amount of HIFU exposure. One of the promising monitoring methods is localized motion imaging (LMI), which estimates coagulation length by detecting the change in stiffness. In this study, we improved the accuracy of our previous LMI by dynamic cross-correlation window (DCCW) and maximum vibration amount (MVA) methods. The DCCW method was used to increase the accuracy of estimating vibration amplitude, and the MVA method was employed to increase signal–noise ratio of the decrease ratio at the coagulated area. The qualitative comparison of results indicated that the two proposed methods could suppress the effect of noise. Regarding the results of the quantitative comparison, coagulation length was estimated with higher accuracy by the improved LMI method, and the root-mean-square error (RMSE) was reduced from 2.51 to 1.69 mm.
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