Numerical modeling of ultrasound heating for the correction of viscous heating artifacts in soft tissue temperature measurements

Abstract

Measuring temperature during focused ultrasound (FUS) procedures is critical for characterization, calibration, and monitoring to ultimately ensure safety and efficacy. Despite the low cost and the high spatial and temporal resolutions of temperature measurements using thermocouples, the viscous heating (VH) artifact at the thermocouple-tissue interface requires reading corrections for correct thermometric analysis. In this study, a simulation pipeline is proposed to correct the VH artifact arising from temperature measurements using thermocouples in FUS fields. The numerical model consists of simulating a primary source of heating due to ultrasound absorption and a secondary source of heating from viscous forces generated by the thermocouple in the FUS field. Our numerical validation found that up to 90% of the measured temperature rise was due to VH effects. Experimental temperature measurements were performed using thermocouples embedded in fresh chicken breast samples. Temperature corrections were demonstrated for single high-intensity FUS pulses at 3.1 MHz and for multiple pulses (3.1 MHz, 100 Hz, and 500 Hz pulse repetition frequency). The VH accumulated during sonications and produced a temperature increase of 3.1 °C and 15.3 °C for the single and multiple pulse sequences, respectively. The methodology presented here enables the decoupling of the temperature increase generated by absorption and VH. Thus, more reliable temperature measurements can be extracted from thermocouple measurements by correcting for VH.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
May 20, 2019
Source ID
10.1063/1.5091108

Entities

People

  • Christian Aurup
  • Elisa Konofagou
  • Hermes A S Kamimura
  • Stephen A Lee
  • Thomas Tiennot

Organizations

  • Columbia University
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • National Institutes of Health
  • PSL Research University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Medical Imaging.
  • Thermal Physics or Thermal Science.