Design and implementation of gantry movement controller and simple scanning patterns in ultrasound hyperthermia

Abstract

Scanned focussed ultrasound has been extensively used as a modality to induce hyperthermia for cancer treatment. A major area of research involves determining optimal methods for scanning the ultrasound focus in the tumor. For this research, two new scanning patterns have been designed and implemented in software. The first scanning pattern developed was the circular scan which made use of the rotate and tilt axes of the transducer gantry in an attempt to solve the problem of beam overlap during scanning. The second pattern developed was the yawed octagonal scan which provided more flexibility in scanning tumors of different sizes and orientations. Secondly, the commercial gantry movement control unit being used at the University of Arizona was replaced with a more compact functional unit and interfaced to personal computer with a highly user friendly interface for performing the ultrasound scanning routines to induce hyperthermia in tumors.