This article theoretically studies the influence of inhomogeneous abdominal walls on focused therapeutic ultrasound based on the phase screen model. An inhomogeneous tissue is considered as a combination of a homogeneous medium and a phase aberration screen. Variations of acoustic parameters such as peak positive pressure, peak negative pressure, and acoustic intensity are discussed with respect to the phase screen statistics of human abdominal walls. Results indicate that the abdominal wall can result in energy loss of the sound in the focal plane. For a typical human abdominal wall with correlation length of 7.9 mm and variance of 0.36, the peak acoustic intensity radiated from a 1MHz transmitter with a radius of 30 mm can be reduced by about 14% at the focal plane.
This article proposes a finite element model （FEM） for predicting the acoustic scattering from an encapsulated microbubble near rigid boundary. The validity of the model is first examined by comparing the acoustic nonlinear response of a free microbubble with that obtained by the Church model. Then this model is used to investigate the effect of the rigid boundary on acoustic scattering signals from microbubble. The results indicate that the resonance frequency decreases while the oscillation amplitude increases as the microbubble approaches the rigid boundary. In addition, the fundamental component of the acoustic scattering signal is enhanced compared with that of the free microbubble.
