Design of a sparse sub-array for focused ultrasound surgery of large tumors

High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) has gained considerable interest for clinical applications in recent decades due to its noninvasive characteristics. However current HIFU systems have limitations due to treatment times. Specifically it takes about two to three hours for the treatment of large tumors such as uterine fibroids. Optimal treatment with reduced time and costs as well as enhanced safety need fundamental innovation in HIFU technologies like transducer architecture and beam focusing to enable fast ablation of large tumors. The ultimate purpose of this research is the evaluation of the feasibility of rapid HIFU treatment of large-sized tumors. To enable this, new multi-element HIFU transducer architecture, which can generate multiple foci simultaneously with minimal grating lobes, has been designed and evaluated. Adopting the proposed transducer architecture provides a 70% reduction of RF driving channels but retains similar sonication effect with the full array. This might reduce the number of RF driving channels and cut down the cost.