Multi-resolution simulation of focused ultrasound propagation through ovine skull from a single-element transducer.

Multi-resolution simulation of focused ultrasound propagation through ovine skull from a single-element transducer. Phys Med Biol. 2018 Apr 16;: Authors: Yoon K, Lee W, Croce P, Cammalleri A, Yoo SS Abstract Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) is emerging as a non-invasive brain stimulation modality. Complicated interactions between acoustic pressure waves and osseous tissue introduce many challenges in the accurate targeting of an acoustic focus through the cranium. Image-guidance accompanied by a numerical simulation is desired to predict the intracranial acoustic propagation through the skull; however, such simulations typically demand sophisticated computation, which warrants an expedited processing method to provide on-site feedback for the user in guiding the acoustic focus to a particular brain region. In this paper, we present a multi-resolution simulation method based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) formulation to model the transcranial propagation of acoustic waves from a single-element transducer (250 kHz). The multi-resolution approach improves computational efficiency by providing the flexibility in adjusting the spatial resolution. The simulation was also accelerated by utilizing parallelized computation through the graphic processing unit (GPU). To evaluate the accuracy of the method, we measured the actual acoustic fields through ex vivo sheep skulls with different sonication incident angles. The measur...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research