Evaluation of thermal effect with cavitation in 1.1 MHz ultrasound emission

In this study, experiments were performed for the generation of ultrasound cavitation, which was accompanied by high energy intensity and a temperature increase. First, the ultrasound cavitation was monitored by performing a computer simulation; then, the thermal emission was predicted on the basis of the simulation results. The cavitation generation was simulated by using Matlab 6.0(Mathworks, USA) on the basis of the Keller equation, and the change in the bubble radius was analyzed. On the basis of the bio-heat transfer equation, the increase in the generated cavitation temperature was analyzed by simulating an equilibrium state at 1.1 MHz. To confirm the validity of our simulation result, a Bovine serum albumin (BSA) phantom was developed, and used for generating cavitation; the thermal emission of the cavitation was also studied under the same conditions as those for the simulation. An analysis of the two sets of results using the Pearson correlation indicated that the maximum temperature, region, and diameter of cavitation, and the correlation coefficient for each temperature value at a significance level 0f 0.774 – 0.904 were comparable with each other.