Dual-frequency intravascular thrombolysis with miniaturized forward-looking transducers

Thrombo-occlusive disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, which primarily arise from blood clot formation in deep veins. However, the existing treatment methods, including mechanical thrombectomy and pharmaceutical drug treatment usually suffer from potential risk of blood vessel damages and long treatment times. Recently, ultrasound-enhanced thrombolysis (ie sonothrombolysis) has been actively investigated due to its relatively high efficiency and safety compared to thrombolytic treatment alone. Dual frequency sonothrombolysis may improve existing single frequency sonothrombolysis techniques. Notably, when the same power is applied, the dual-frequency sonothrombolysis has been reported to be more efficient due to its relatively higher peak-negative pressure compared with single-frequency treatment. However, there is no report on dual frequency sonothombolysis using intravascular transducers. Moreover, there is a lack of sonothrombolysis comparison with different frequency combinations. Therefore, in this work, the effect of dual-frequency treatment on the intravascular thrombolysis was investigated with under various frequency combinations. The results indicated that the dual-frequency treatment had a 18% higher thrombolysis rate with an increasing trend when the difference between two frequency components increased.