Notice of Removal: Integrated histotripsy and bubble coalescence transducer for rapid tissue ablation

Abstract

Histotripsy uses high-pressure, microsecond-length pulses to generate cavitation microbubbles to fractionate targeted tissue. After the collapse of a cavitation cloud, remnant microbubbles can persist for a second or longer before passively dissolving. These bubbles can act as seed nuclei for subsequent cavitation events reducing treatment efficiency because the nuclei are not well distributed through the entire volume. It has been shown that this memory effect can be reduced using a second transducer to generate a long low amplitude burst to stimulate coalescence of remnant bubbles. This study presents an integrated transducer system to deliver both the high amplitude (p-≥ 30 MPa) histotripsy pulses and lower-amplitude (∼ 1 MPa) coalescence sequences to achieve rapid, homogenous ablation.