Ultrasound autofocusing using reflections

Inventors

Prus, Oleg • Levy, Yoav

Assignees

Insightec Ltd

Abstract

Various approaches of focusing an ultrasound transducer having multiple transducer elements to a target region include generating at least one acoustic reflector in the target region; transmitting ultrasound waves to the acoustic reflector; measuring reflections off the acoustic reflector; and based at least in part on the measured reflections, adjusting the parameter value associated with the transducer element(s).

Core Innovation

The invention uses an ultrasound transducer comprising a plurality of transducer elements to generate one or more microbubbles in a target region, and repeatedly focuses based on measured reflections from those microbubbles acting as acoustic reflectors. The controller transmits ultrasound waves to the target region using initial parameter values associated with the transducer elements, measures reflections of the transmitted ultrasound waves off at least one microbubble in the target region using a detector device or a sub-region of the ultrasound transducer, and adjusts a parameter value associated with at least one transducer element based at least in part on the measured reflections.

The stopping condition depends on a deviation between phase behavior from the most recent iteration and phase behavior from a previous iteration. The controller repeats the adjustment, transmit, and measure loop until the deviation between a phase difference in a current iteration and a phase difference in a previous iteration is below a threshold.

The disclosure frames the approach for ultrasound through skull aberrations and describes optional system architectures that include a phased-array transducer, a beamformer, a controller, and configurations that use sub-regions of the transducer for transmit and/or measurement. Variants include detecting microbubble generation using an imager such as MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, or ultrasonography, and optionally estimating an initial parameter value using a physical model or using transmitted or reflected ultrasound measurements.

Claims Coverage

The independent claim defines one microbubble-based ultrasound focusing loop with iterative transmit, measure, adjust, and repeat steps, and a stopping condition based on phase-difference deviation between iterations.

Across the independent claim, focusing is achieved by generating microbubbles in a target region, transmitting ultrasound with initial transducer-element parameter values, measuring microbubble reflections via a detector device or transducer sub-region, adjusting a transducer-element parameter based on those reflections, and repeating until a stopping condition based on phase-difference deviation between iterations is below a threshold.

Stated Advantages

Documented Applications

No documented applications found