The inertial cavitation characteristics of SonoVue microbubbles mediated by pulsed ultrasound

Extending the clinical application of SonoVue microbubbles from disease diagnosis to therapy is currently attracting considerable research interest. To coordinate therapeutic efficiency and bio-safety, it is important to comprehensively understand the relationship between acoustic parameters and the inertial cavitation characteristics of SonoVue microbubbles. A tissue phantom was fabricated to hold SonoVue bubble solution, a 1 MHz plane transducer and another7.5 MHz focused transducer were employed for triggering cavitation of SonoVue bubbles and receiving acoustic signal,respectively. Then the signal was amplified and recorded by a high-speed AD. After the time and frequency domains were deeply analyzed by fast flourier transform, the total energy and duration of the broadband signals were used to evaluate the inertial cavitation dose(ICD) and inertial cavitation period(ICP) of SonoVue bubbles.We found:the onset and dose of inertial cavitation of SonoVue bubbles were dependent on the peak negative pressure, and ICP decreased with the increasing peak negative pressure. Both the pulse repetition frequency and pulse duration were positively correlated with ICD and ICP. These results can provide useful information for therapeutic applications of the SonoVue microbubbles.