Ultrasound phased arrays for noninvasive myocardial ablation: initial studies

Catheter based ablation of cardiac tissue has been shown to provide an immediate and long lasting cure for cardiac arrhythmia. However, the procedure does not always allow placing the catheter in close proximity to the pathological tissues requiring ablation. Use of non-invasive focused ultrasound ablation in the moving heart is an attractive potential alternative to catheter based ablative therapy. In this paper, initial studies have been performed to explore the feasibility of using ultrasound phased array technology for this application. A 3-D treatment planning software package was developed to study the available acoustic windows allowing ultrasound to be focused on the myocardium. Numerical simulation studies of the feasibility of precise beam forming by propagating ultrasound around the ribs shows that the beam, even though formed by an irregularly shaped subset of phased array elements not blocked by ribs and air, was very sharply focused at the target. Using invasive phase aberration correction algorithms developed in our lab, experiments with pork and human rib phantoms confirm the ability to precisely form beams with phased array through the available non-contiguous windows.