Acoustic radiation force due to nonaxisymmetric sound beams incident on spherical viscoelastic scatterers in tissue

Abstract

The theory for acoustic radiation force on a viscoelastic sphere of arbitrary size in tissue was extended recently to account for nonaxisymmetric incident fields [Ilinskii et al., POMA 19, 045004 (2013)]. A spherical harmonic expansion was used to describe the incident field. This work was specialized at the spring 2014 ASA meeting to focused axisymmetric sound beams with various focal spot sizes and a scatterer located at the focus. The emphasis of the present contribution is nonaxisymmetric fields, either through moving the scatterer off the axis of an axisymmetric beam or through explicitly defining a nonaxisymmetric beam. This is accomplished via angular spectrum decomposition of the incident field, spherical wave expansions of the resulting plane waves about the center of the scatterer, Wigner D-matrix transformations to express these spherical waves in a coordinate system with the polar axis aligned with the desired radiation force component, and finally integration over solid angle to obtain spherical wave amplitudes as required in the theory. Various scatterer sizes and positions relative to the focus are considered, and the effects of changing properties of both the scatterer and the surrounding tissue are examined. [Work supported by the ARL:UT McKinney Fellowship in Acoustics.]