Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The importance of therapeutic ultrasound in medicine and biology and the span of its pre-clinical and clinical applications have been extensively expanded during past couple of decades. Therapeutic ultrasound modalities based on their mechanisms of interaction with tissue are divided into two main categories: (a) methods based on thermal effects which include physical therapy, hyperthermia, and intensive focused ultrasound that itself is divided into two main modalities: high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) and low intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU), and (b) methods based on non-thermal effects which include lithotripsy, histotripsy, low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS), and kHz-frequency power ultrasound. The success of therapeutic ultrasound as a non-invasive clinical modality greatly depends on reliable and real-time imaging methods to monitor and control the therapy operation. For those therapeutic ultrasound modalities that rely on thermal effects, besides a reliable imaging method another challenging limitation is lack of a reliable, non-invasive and affordable thermometry method to monitor tissue temperature changes during thermal treatments. The current research proposal leverages my extensive background and expertise in the areas of nonlinear ultrasound and therapeutic ultrasound to define a research program toward addressing the above-mentioned limitations and also opening the path toward novel image-guided thermal therapy applications. Two objectives will be pursued in the proposed research: Objective 1 - To develop novel nonlinear ultrasound-based thermometry methods to monitor and control thermal therapies using either therapeutic ultrasound or interstitial laser heating modalities. The developed methods will be tested in various ex vivo tissue models toward real-time implementation using clinical ultrasound scanners for ultimate in vivo animal studies and human clinical thermal therapy applications. Objective 2 - To develop novel nonlinear ultrasound-based imaging methods to address the current limitations of ultrasound B-mode imaging in terms of improvements in SNR, contrast, and spatial and temporal resolutions. The algorithms developed under the Objective 1 will be adopted and modified to this end. The developed imaging methods can be used as the imaging modality for monitoring and controlling therapeutic procedures in various image-guided therapeutic ultrasound or interstitial laser heating treatments. The proposed research program will provide excellent HQP training opportunities through several research projects defined toward investigating the basic science and developing novel therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Moreover, the trainees will have the opportunity to directly interact with medical devices industry through an extensive industry collaboration program that is currently ongoing in my research lab, within an interdisciplinary, inclusive and equitable environment.