Miniaturized focused ultrasound transducers for intravascular therapies

Intravascular ultrasound approach has shown its advantages for thrombectomy. Catheter-directed ultrasound techniques have realized safe therapies by suppressing mechanical contact and penetration of excessive ultrasound energy through the tissue. One limitation of this approach is the lack of the sufficient ultrasound energy for fast thrombectomy because typical catheter-mounted transducers have high-frequency and low acoustic power. In this work, we aim to resolve this problem by designing miniaturized focused ultrasound transducers for improved therapeutic efficacy, which can generate low-frequency, sufficient pressure output within the confined insonation beam. This study builds upon our previous initial design of sub-megahertz, forward-looking, focused ultrasound transducers for preliminary in vitro study on microbubble-mediated thrombolysis. 650 kHz, forward-looking, concave-aperture ultrasound transducers were designed and mounted on 5-6 F catheters. The effect of design factors including aperture diameter, radius-of-curvature, and concave lens acoustic impedance on focusing performance were analyzed by using finite element analysis. Although the theoretical prerequisites for ideal beam focusing were not fulfilled due to the spatial limitation, the simulation results showed that practical design of the concave lens with the small geometrical aperture still enables to generate confined beam with a reasonable focal gain. Experimental validation results confirmed that the focal gain of 9 dB can be achievable. The measured transmitting sensitivity of the concave aperture transducer is 22.5 kPa/V_pp.