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Abstract
Objectives
Focused ultrasound (FUS) therapy has emerged as a promising noninvasive solution for tumor ablation. Accurate monitoring and guidance of ultrasound energy is crucial for effective FUS treatment. Although ultrasound (US) imaging is a well-suited modality for FUS monitoring, US-guided FUS (USgFUS) faces challenges in achieving precise monitoring, leading to unpredictable ablation shapes and a lack of quantitative monitoring. The demand for precise FUS monitoring heightens when complete tumor ablation involves controlling multiple sonication procedures.
Methods
To address these challenges, we propose an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted USgFUS framework, incorporating an AI segmentation model with B-mode ultrasound imaging. This method labels the ablated regions distinguished by the hyperechogenicity effect, potentially bolstering FUS guidance. We evaluated our proposed method using the Swin-Unet AI architecture, conducting experiments with a USgFUS setup on chicken breast tissue.
Results
Our results showed a 93% accuracy in identifying ablated areas marked by the hyperechogenicity effect in B-mode imaging.
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that AI-assisted ultrasound monitoring can significantly improve the precision and control of FUS treatments, suggesting a crucial advancement toward the development of more effective FUS treatment strategies.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Additionally, we extend our sincere appreciation to Josh Kazi for his valuable assistance in conducting experiments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability
The code and data used in this publication are publicly available at https://github.com/hosseinbv/HIFU_Segmentation.git. The repository contains all the code used to generate the results reported in the paper, as well as the datasets and pre-trained models used in the experiments.