The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the formation of the thermal lesion and the major parameters of the external ultrasound heating systems, and to propose a useful thermal lesion determination procedure, which is capable of specifying the range of a thermal lesion by temperature feedback in external ultrasound thermal therapy. This work is based on an ideal ultrasound power deposition formed by an external ultrasound heating system and the temperature distribution is calculated by the transient bioheat transfer equation. A simplified model was employed to determine the heating pattern for four most important parameters. Through the simplified power expression, the property of a new parameter, T300, which is defined as the maximal temperature corresponding to the thermal dose of 300 minutes, is also investigated. When the target volume is large enough such that the thermal conduction effect becomes negligible, the T300 value is almost independent of the system parameters and the heating strategies, and is dominated by the blood perfusion rate with a monotonic correlation. The method enables us to use feedback information in the ultrasound heating process and to pre-determine the heating range of the thermal lesion, which will be very useful in ultrasound treatment planning.
THERMAL LESION FORMATION AND DETERMINATION FOR EXTERNAL ULTRASOUND THERMAL THERAPY
