Simulations of transcranial passive acoustic mapping with hemispherical sparse arrays using computed tomography-based aberration corrections

Abstract

Passive acoustic mapping (PAM) is receiving increasing interest as a method for monitoring focused ultrasound (FUS) therapy. PAM would be beneficial during transcranial cavitation-enhanced FUS treatments, particularly non-thermal, cavitation-mediated applications such as FUS-induced blood–brain barrier disruption or sonothrombolysis, for which no real-time monitoring technique currently exists. However, the use of PAM in the brain is complicated by the presence of the skull bone. If not properly accounted for, skull-induced aberrations of propagating cavitation emissions will lead to image distortion and artifacts upon reconstruction. Through the use of numerical simulations, this study investigated the feasibility of transcranial PAM via hemispherical sparse hydrophone arrays. A multi-layered ray acoustic transcranial ultrasound propagation model based on computed tomography-derived skull morphology was developed. By incorporating skull-specific aberration corrections into a conventional passive beamforming algorithm [Norton and Won, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 38, 1337–1343 (2000)], simulated acoustic source fields were spatially mapped through digitized human skulls. The effects of array sparsity and receiver element configuration on the formation of passive acoustic maps were examined. Multiple source locations were simulated to determine the imageable volume within the skull cavity. Finally, the reconstruction algorithm's sensitivity to noise was explored.