High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive clinical procedure for the ablation of tumours and stones. It consists of precisely focusing ultrasound on a target site within the body to generate a cavitation bubble cloud.
The HIFU-generated bubble cloud oscillates under acoustic excitation and eventually collapses releasing energy sufficient to erode neighbouring tissues up to ablation. Through idealised experiments and modelling, we investigate the dynamics of such clouds in the aim of predicting and controlling them, in order to help optimise the driving conditions to minimise off-target effects. The image shows a sub-millimetric bubble cloud, consisting of hundreds of micrometric individual bubbles, generated with HIFU. These types of experiments shed light on their intricate collective dynamics driving the cloud properties, the physics of which remains highly elusive.