| dc.description.abstract | There are a lot of risks in cancer treatment by invasive surgery, such as bleeding, wound infection, and long recovery time, etc. Therefore, there is great need for minimally- or non-invasive treatment. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a rapidly growing and truly non-invasive technology. It has been widely used in therapeutic applications, such as rapid tissue heating and tissue ablation. With proper imaging guidance, HIFU treatment can be performed totally noninvasively. Currently, ultrasound imaging-guided HIFU has been extensively studied. However, ultrasound imaging guidance is less precise because of the relatively low imaging contrast, sensitivity, and specificity for noninvasive detection. In this study, we employed photoacoustic imaging (PAI) technique, which has been developed a novel promising imaging technique for early cancer detection, to guide HIFU treatment. The goal of this study is to investigate the feasibility of PAI to guide, monitor in real time and enhance the HIFU therapy. In this dissertation, as the first step, the integrated PAI and HIFU system had been shown to have the feasibility to guide HIFU both ex vivo and in vivo. Then, the system was improved and developed to a real-time PAI-guided HIFU system. It is demonstrated that the sensitivity of PA detection for HIFU lesion is very high and the saturation of PA signals can be used as the indicator for tissue coagulation. During the temperature measurement using this system, laser-enhanced HIFU heating was found. Thus, we further investigated the laser enhanced technique in both HIFU heating and pulsed HIFU thrombolysis. In the HIFU therapy, laser light was employed to illuminate the sample concurrently with HIFU radiation. The resulting cavitation was detected with a passive cavitation detector. We demonstrated that concurrent light illumination during HIFU has the potential to significantly enhance HIFU by reducing cavitation threshold. | |
