Towards the optimisation of acoustic fields for ablative therapies of tumours in the upper abdomen

Abstract

The efficacy of high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) for the non-invasive treatment of cancer has been demonstrated for a range of different cancers including those of the liver, kidney, prostate and breast. As a non-invasive focused therapy, HIFU offers considerable advantages over other techniques such as chemotherapy and surgical resection, in terms of its non-invasiveness and low risk of harmful side effects. There is, however, a number of significant challenges which currently hinder its widespread clinical application. One of these challenges is the need to transmit sufficient energy through the ribcage to induce tissue necrosis at the required foci whilst minimising the formation of side lobes and sparing healthy tissue. Ribs both absorb and reflect ultrasound strongly. As such, a common side effect of focusing ultrasound in regions located behind the rib cage is the overheating of bone and surrounding tissue, which can lead to skin burns. Successful treatment of a patient with tumours in the upper abdomen therefore requires a thorough understanding of the way acoustic and thermal energy are deposited. This is likely to rely on a treatment planning procedure in which optimal source velocity distributions are obtained so as to maximise a dose quantity at the treatment sites, whilst ensuring that this quantity does not exceed a specified threshold at other field locations, particularly on the surface of the ribs. Previously, a boundary element approach based on a Generalised Minimal Residual (GMRES) implementation of the Burton-Miller formulation was developed to predict the field of a multi-element HIFU array scattered by human ribs, the topology of which was obtained from CT scan data [1]. This work describes the reformulation of the boundary element equations as a least-squares minimisation problem with non-linear constraints. The methodology was subsequently tested at an excitation frequency of 100 kHz on a spherical multi-element array in the presence of a perfectly rigid cylindrical scatterer with hemi-spherical end-caps. Reduction of side lobes in the exterior domain and of acoustic pressure magnitudes on the surface of the cylinder were achieved whilst preserving a local maximum in the focal region.