Pulsed Focused Nonlinear Acoustic Fields from Clinically Relevant Therapeutic Sources in Layered Media: Experimental Data and Numerical Prediction Results

In many therapeutic applications of a pulsed focused ultrasound with various intensities the finite-amplitude acoustic waves propagate in water before penetrating into tissues and their local heating. Water is used as the matching, cooling and harmonics generating medium. In order to design ultrasonic probes for various therapeutic applications based on the local tissue heating induced in selected organs as well as to plan ultrasonic regimes of treatment a knowledge of pressure variations in pulsed focused nonlinear acoustic beams produced in layered media is necessary. The main objective of this work was to verify experimentally the applicability of the recently developed numerical model based on the Time-Averaged Wave Envelope (TAWE) approach (Wójcik et al., 2006) as an effective research tool for predicting the pulsed focused nonlinear fields produced in two-layer media comprising of water and tested materials (with attenuation arbitrarily dependent on frequency) by clinically relevant axially-symmetric therapeutic sources. First, the model was verified in water as a reference medium with known linear and nonlinear acoustic properties. The measurements in water were carried out at a 25◦C temperature using a 2.25 MHz circular focused (f/3.0) transducer with an effective diameter of 29 mm. The measurement results obtained for 8-cycle tone bursts with three different initial pressure amplitudes varied between 37 kPa and 113 kPa were compared with the numerical predictions obtained for the source boundar