Investigation of an Active Measurement Method to Detect Inertial Cavitation and the Presence of Potential Drug Carriers

Drug carriers, such as nanoparticles, are capable of releasing pharmaceutically active ingredients, which can be initiated by focused ultrasound via the effect of inertial cavitation. This effect of inertial cavitation is often verified by passive measurement methods that rely on the analysis of emitted acoustic signals caused by the implosion of bubbles. However, a major issue of such methods is their inability to detect the presence of potential drugs in human vessels, complicating the implementation of a closed loop control for future medical therapies. Therefore, this contribution introduces an active measurement method to determine both inertial cavitation and the presence of potential drug carriers in a tissue mimicking phantom

Scaling of Subcellular Structures

As cells grow, the size and number of their internal organelles increase in order to keep up with increased metabolic requirements. Abnormal size of organelles is a hallmark of cancer and an important aspect of diagnosis in cytopathology. Most organelles vary in either size or number, or both, as a function of cell size, but the mechanisms that create this variation remain unclear. In some cases, organelle size appears to scale with cell size through processes of relative growth, but in others the size may be set by either active measurement systems or genetic programs that instruct organelle biosynthetic activities to create organelles of a size appropriate to a given cell type.