Excitation of polymer-shelled contrast agents with high-frequency ultrasound

Excitation of polymer-shelled contrast agents with high-frequency ultrasound.

Few experimental and complementary theoretical studies have investigated high-frequency (>20 MHz) nonlinear responses from polymer-shelled ultrasound contrast agents. Three polymer agents with different shell properties were examined for their single-bubble backscatter when excited with a 40 MHz tone burst. Higher-order harmonic responses were observed for the three agents; however, their occur...

Quantification of Ultrasound Contrast Agents Using High Frequency Ultrasound

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) are small microbubbles filled with gas. Because of their scattering properties, UCAs enhance the diagnostic capabilities of ultrasonic imaging. UCAs are associated with therapeutic or enhancing therapeutic applications of ultrasound and with possible adverse bioeffects. Quantification of the in vivo concentration of microbubbles is therefore essential to establ...

Nonlinear dynamics of lipid-shelled ultrasound microbubble contrast agents

Encapsulated gas microbubbles, known as contrast agents, are widely used in ultrasound medical applications. The present study is devoted to modelling of the spatio-temporal dynamics of lipid-shelled contrast agents. A theoretical model is proposed that describes the radial and translational motion of a lipid-shelled microbubble in an ultrasound field. The model approximates the behaviour of th...

Visualization of multimodal polymer-shelled contrast agents using ultrasound contrast sequences: an experimental study in a tissue mimicking flow phantom

BACKGROUND A multimodal polymer-shelled contrast agent (CA) with target specific potential was recently developed and tested for its acoustic properties in a single element transducer setup. Since the developed polymeric CA has different chemical composition than the commercially available CAs, there is an interest to study its acoustic response when using clinical ultrasound systems. The aim o...

Acoustic characterisation of ultrasound contrast agents at high frequency