Candidate: YanYan Tran
Date: October 30, 2023
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Location: EIT 3142
Supervisor(s): Alfred Yu
Abstract:
The development of targeted drug delivery technology to increase the specificity and efficacy of cancer treatments and reduce reliance on systemic chemotherapy drugs have long been areas of research. Recent advances in therapeutic ultrasound have shown that targeted, enhanced drug uptake can be achieved using ultrasound-mediated microbubble cavitation, a non-invasive therapy which leverages the mechanical effects of cavitation to increase vascular permeability to drugs. Spatiotemporal measurement and control of cavitation activity is needed to ensure that only the desired bioeffects are induced and the harmful ones are avoided. However, many of the current passive cavitation mapping (PCM) methods lack a standard, system-independent measure of cavitation dose, which impedes the generalisability of research into cavitation-bioeffects relationships.
In this thesis, we propose an experimental platform and comparative study that enables us to evaluate the accuracy and performance of PCM methods end-to-end. Using this platform, we reveal frequency-dependent and algorithm-dependent biases in the calculation of cavitation dose. These findings confirm that PCM-induced dose bias needs to be accounted for in cavitation dose reporting. Overall, the proposed method was able to quantify differences in cavitation dose accuracy of PCM methods, the first step needed toward the goal of standardizing cavitation dosimetry, which can potentially allow for the smoother clinical translation of cavitation-mediated therapies.