Sonothrombolysis for acute ischemic stroke treatment

Stroke has been one of the highest cause of death in world, accounting for almost 10%-12% of deaths in Singapore. Thrombolysis is an effective therapy for ischemic stroke within a limited time window. Neurological outcome depends on the recanalisation time of the occuled vessel. Nonthermal effects of 1MHz ultrasound can accelerate enzymatic fibrinolysis in-vitro. Numerous studies have shown possible results on the ultrasound aided in thrombolysis process, this project aims to examine on the real-time estimation of sonothrombolysis to gain a deeper insights on the behaviour of recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA). The penetration of FITC-tagged rt-PA has increased progressively from 2.61% without ultrasound application to 60% at 0.8 W/cm2. However, there is a observed common trend in all the experiments conducted which the penetration percentage of FITC-tagged rt-PA began to decrease after average time of 40 minutes. The second quantitative analysis aims to further reaffirm the findings but only specimen 3 experiment achieved desirable results. Nevertheless, the findings in this report suggest that protein denaturation plays a part in decline of penetration percentage of FITC-tagged rt-PA which can affect the lysis process.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering