Measurement of time averaged power in HITU fields—effects of duty cycle and target distance

Abstract

The reliable description of the ultrasonic fields of high-intensity therapeutic ultrasound (HITU) devices is a prerequisite concerning the safe application of the method in the daily clinical routine. Since ultrasonic sensors used for the characterization of diagnostic fields are at high risk of being damaged in the strong therapeutic fields, the measurements are carried out in burst mode to reduce the acting temporal-average intensities. For the thorough investigation of possible differences between the excitation in continuous wave (cw) and burst mode, the temporal-average total acoustic output powers of two types of HITU transducers with f-numbers of approximately 1 and with working frequencies between 1.1 MHz and 3.3 MHz were investigated by means of a radiation force balance. The maximum cw equivalent power level was 300 W; the duty cycles varied between 1% and 90%. In addition, the possible effect of the transducer–target distance was investigated. It was found that the different turn-on and turn-off behaviour of the transducers caused variations of the effective duty cycle, depending on the power level and the power amplifier used. The temporal-average power declined with increasing distance as expected, and no focal anomaly was detected.