Abstract
The major obstacles of optical imaging and photothermal therapy in biomedical applications is the strong scattering of light within biological tissues resulting in light defocusing and limited penetration. In this study, we propose high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU)-induced heating tunnel to reduce the photon scattering. To verify our idea, Monte Carlo simulation and intralipid-phantom experiments were conducted. The results show that the thermal effect created by HIFU could improve the light fluence at the targeted region by 3% in both simulation and phantom experiments. Owing to the fluence increase, similar results can also be found in the photoacoustic experiments. In conclusion, our proposed method shows a noninvasive way to increase the light delivery efficiency in turbid medium. It is expected that our finding has a potential for improving the focal light delivery in photoacoustic imaging and photothermal therapy.
Highlights
The major obstacles of optical imaging and photothermal therapy in biomedical applications is the strong scattering of light within biological tissues resulting in light defocusing and limited penetration
The high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) enhancement of light delivery was first simulated in Monte Carlo simulations, and the performance of the technique was validated in an intralipid phantom
The result indicates that the increase in the delivered light energy was the greatest when the diameter of the heating tunnel was 4 mm in each temperature (Fig. 3a)
Summary
The major obstacles of optical imaging and photothermal therapy in biomedical applications is the strong scattering of light within biological tissues resulting in light defocusing and limited penetration. We propose high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU)-induced heating tunnel to reduce the photon scattering. The results show that the thermal effect created by HIFU could improve the light fluence at the targeted region by 3% in both simulation and phantom experiments. Because no chemical agent was involved, the change was reversible Their backward-mode system based on the transmission of ultrasound standing waves was not suitable for in vivo applications. We aimed to develop a safe noninvasive method for improving the delivery of light energy by using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) as a heating source to create a heating tunnel in the scattering medium. An HIFU heating system was integrated with a photoacoustic system to verify the improvement of photoacoustic signals resulting from the improved light delivery (Figs. 1, 2)
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