Abstract
Focused ultrasound (FUS), especially when augmented by microbubbles (MBs), shows the potential for noninvasive ablation of deep-seated tumors, but its clinical adoption is hindered due to its dependency on multiple controllable parameters of FUS and MBs. To accelerate the clinical transition of this noninvasive and target therapy, a virtual lab featuring a two-way coupled Euler-Lagrange computation platform, capable of capturing physics down to individual MBs thus their nonlinear interactions, has been developed to accurately predict the acoustic and thermal fields for microbubble-augmented FUS (MBaFus), and subsequently the resultant temperature rise at the treatment spots. This technical brief concisely summarizes the main features of its numerical algorithms for prediction and high-performance computing schemes for speedup, as well as its preliminary validation against in vitro experiments. Recent progress on further evaluating the numerical virtual lab under ex vivo settings is reported, where FUS treatment for ex vivo porcine liver was conducted and MB augmentation effects to treatment outcome under different MB conditions were compared. It is found that the agreement between our numerical prediction and experimental measurements in the referred ex vivo study is reasonably satisfactory. Though more extensive validations are needed when extra ex vivo studies in the public domain become available, this intermediate progress illustrates the potential of this novel numerical platform serving as a virtual lab of microbubble-augmented FUS for noninvasive tumor ablation.