Acoustic holograms for bilateral blood-brain barrier opening in a mouse model
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME)
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Microbubble-enhanced focused ultrasound (FUS) allows the blood-brain barrier opening (BBBO) for drug delivery into the brain. However, single-element FUS technologies do not allow high-resolution, multi-focal, simultaneous targeting, in addition to distortion of the focused beam due to skull aberrations. In this work, we present the first preclinical BBBO application of acoustic holograms in mice. A 3D-printed hologram coupled to a single-element focused transducer produced two symmetric foci while compensating for the skull aberrations. T1-weighted MRI showed BBBO at two quasi-spherical spots. This work demonstrates the feasibility of hologram-assisted BBBO for low-cost and highly-localized drug delivery in a mouse brain.
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