ABLATION OF 3D CANCER TUMOR SPHEROIDS USING HIGH INTENSITY FOCUSED ULTRASOUND (HIFU)

Abstract

According to the WHO, cancer-related fatalities are increasing every year globally. Even though many therapies are available at the moment, these therapies have a very high cost, an average success rate, and many side effects. Recent studies and research have explored the application of ultrasonic waves to different cancer tumors. The broad range of intensities and frequencies of ultrasound signals, and the ability of their beams to be focused to propagate deeply through tissues into small-scale targets non-invasively, makes ultrasound technology very interesting for healthcare applications. This new technology has gained worldwide interest among researchers because it is cheaper and safer than current treatments. Many basic studies have already been done on ultrasound and cancer tumor ablation, but they lack discipline and uniformity. In this work, the interest is in High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) Thermal Cancer Ablation. The aim of this project is to investigate and carry out a systematic study that covers the different parameters that affect ultrasound waves that cause cellular ablation. Different parameters include frequency, amplitude or voltage, duty cycle, and sonication time. The ablation mechanism of interest is the thermal ablation mechanism. The first part of the work consists of characterization of ultrasound transducers by creating 4D heatmaps that show the variation of intensity distribution. The second part of the work, cellular ablation, is accomplished by using high intensity focused immersible transducers, which produce high-frequency ultrasonic waves with high intensities at the focal region that hit a specific target with high accuracy. Temperatures in this region will increase, leading to cell death. The 2D and 3D (spheroids) breast cancer (MDA-MBA-231 and MCF-7) cell culture models were used in the study to find the suitable parameters that would yield the highest cancer cell death percentage. Our study showed promising results on cancer cell ablation using HIFU and proved to be a suitable future therapy for benign cancerous tumors.