Monitoring of HIFU-based therapy procedures with elastography

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that elastography be used to monitor minimally invasive thermal based surgery techniques which depending on the delivered energy cause reversible or irreversible tissue changes. In this study reversible and irreversible heat induced tissue changes were induced in freshly excised tissue and the changes were visualized using elastography. The irreversible changes were induced using a HIFU system while the reversible changes were induced using a thin resistive Nichrome wire (32A WG) inserted into the tissue. It was shown that the irreversible tissue change consisted of a significant increase in the tissue stiffness resulting from protein denaturation. The reversible changes consisted of small softening and hardening of the tissue, which may be caused by the breakdown of hydrogen and other weak bonds and aqueous thermal expansion respectively. It was also shown that subtraction elastography significantly improves the depiction of the heat induced tissue stiffness changes.

Monitoring of HIFU-based therapy procedures with elastography Academic Article