HIFU Thermometry

  • Kim, Younsu, et al. “A novel 3D ultrasound thermometry method for HIFU ablation using an ultrasound element.” 2017 IEEE international ultrasonics symposium (IUS). IEEE, 2017.
  • Audigier, Chloé, et al. “Simulation of high intensity focused ultrasound ablation to enable ultrasound thermal monitoring.” Medical Imaging 2018: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling. Vol. 10576. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2018.
  • Audigier, Chloé, et al. “Physics-based simulation to enable ultrasound monitoring of hifu ablation: An mri validation.” International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Springer, Cham, 2018.

High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a noninvasive thermal ablation technique. To perform the ablation procedure safely, temperature monitoring is employed to preserve healthy tissues while simultaneously ensuring that the targeted region is completely ablated. It is usually performed under MR monitoring, which provides reliable real-time thermal information to ensure a complete tumor ablation while preserving as much healthy tissue as possible. Unfortunately, many patients do not necessarily have access to this expensive and cumbersome cutting-edge technology, which is prohibitive for a widespread use of MRI to guide thermal ablation procedures. Ultrasound (US) thermometry techniques have the advantages of cost-effectiveness and portability over other medical imaging modalities such as MRI. We propose a 3D US thermal monitoring method for HIFU ablation. A US element and sampling device are used to acquire time-of-flight (TOF) information, from which we reconstruct speed of sound (SOS) images to detect the temperature increase during the ablation. We use a physics-based HIFU simulation to segment the ablated region of interest (ROI) to cope with the sparsity of the recorded data. HIFU thermal ablations were performed under MR monitoring on a phantom for validation.