3D perfused brain phantom for interstitial ultrasound thermal therapy and imaging: design, construction and characterization

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Thermal therapy has emerged as an independent modality of treating some tumors. In many clinics the hyperthermia, one of the thermal therapy modalities, has been used adjuvant to radio- or chemotherapy to substantially improve the clinical treatment outcomes. In this work, a methodology for building a realistic brain phantom for interstitial ultrasound low dose-rate thermal therapy of the brain is proposed. A 3D brain phantom made of the tissue mimicking material (TMM) had the acoustic and thermal properties in the 20–32 °C range, which is similar to that of a brain at 37 °C. The phantom had 10–11% by mass of bovine gelatin powder dissolved in ethylene glycol. The TMM sonicated at 1 MHz, 1.6 MHz and 2.5 MHz yielded the amplitude attenuation coefficients of 62 ± 1 dB m−1, 115 ± 4 dB m−1 and 175 ± 9 dB m−1, respectively. The density and acoustic speed determination at room temperature (~24 °C) gave 1040 ± 40 kg m−3 and 1545 ± 44 m s−1, respectively. The average thermal conductivity was 0.532 W m−1 K−1. The T1 and T2 values of the TMM were 207 ± 4 and 36.2 ± 0.4 ms, respectively. We envisage the use of our phantom for treatment planning and for quality assurance in MRI based temperature determination. Our phantom preparation methodology may be readily extended to other thermal therapy technologies.