Improvement of contrast ratio between cavitation bubbles and tissue by frequency filtering in triplet pulse ultrasound imaging

Abstract

Bubble-enhanced high-intensity focused ultrasound treatment requires selective imaging of cavitation bubbles to ensure their localization to the target tissue. Previous studies have proposed the ultrasound imaging of cavitation bubbles with a filtering method, which makes bubble extraction by a triplet pulse sequence more selective. The envelope component as well as harmonic components are generated during the nonlinear propagation of an ultrasonic imaging pulse, but the triplet pulse sequence can significantly reduce only the harmonic components, and its selectivity is degraded by the residual envelope component. In this study, the effects of nonlinear propagation at various intensities of imaging pulse and the frequency filtering to obtain better selectivity are investigated for the triplet pulse sequence with a filtering method. The result shows that the imaging pulse intensity is an important parameter that determines the strength of the effect of nonlinear propagation and that the optimal frequency filtering changes according to it.