Backscatter monitoring of high intensity focused ultrasound therapy using a parametric treatment model

Accurate monitoring of high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) surgery is critical to ensuring proper treatment. Pulse-echo diagnostic ultrasound (DU) is a recognized modality for identifying temperature differentials using speckle tracking between two DU radio frequency (RF) frames [2], [4]. This observation has motivated non-parametric temperature estimation, which associates temperature changes directly with the displacement estimates. We present an estimation paradigm termed displacement mode analysis (DMA), which uses physical modeling to associate particular patterns of observed displacement, called displacement modes, with corresponding modes of variation in the administered therapy. This correspondence allows DMA to estimate therapy directly using a linear combination of displacement modes, imbuing these displacement estimates into the reference using interpolation, and by aligning with the treatment frame, providing a therapy estimate with the heating modes. Since DMA is maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the accuracy of its estimates can be assessed a priori, providing error bounds for estimates of applied heating, temperature, and thermal dose. Predicted performance is verified using both simulation and experiment for a point exposure of 4.2 Watts of electrical power in alginate, a tissue mimicking phantom.