A Fat-Tissue Mimic Phantom for Therapeutic Ultrasound

Abstract

As the number of treatments in the therapeutic ultrasound field targeted at fat tissue increase, the performance of the equipment should be evaluated for safety using a fat phantom. In this study, a fat phantom was fabricated using olive oil and a tissue-mimicking material (TMM) phantom. To evaluate the acoustic properties of the TMM phantom according to the changes in the olive oil, the composition ratio of a liquid mixture of olive oil with a surfactant was adjusted from 5?20% in 5% steps. The acoustic properties of the phantom were evaluated using the sound velocity, attenuation coefficient, density, and acoustic impedance. The experimental results showed that the sound velocity decreased with increasing amount of olive oil but the other acoustic properties did not change. In addition, the phantom using an olive-oil mixture with a 15% composition ratio was most similar to the acoustic characteristics of fat tissue with a sound velocity of 1477.35 m/s, an attenuation coefficient of 0.514 dB/MHz-cm, a density of 1.07 g/cm3, and an acoustic impedance of 1.575 MRayl. These experimental results are expected contribute to the accuracy of the results using a TMM phantom and will be useful for the therapeutic ultrasound field targeted at subcutaneous fat tissue.