Ultrasound Simulations

Generating acoustic phantoms of patient-specific spinal cords to investigate the theraputic efficacy of focused ultrasound transducer placement

Therapeutic focused ultrasound is a rapidly maturing technology, showing promise for alleviating the side effects of spinal cord injury by stimulating blood circulation to promote healing. Focused ultrasound can deliver therapy to sub-millimeter focal regions, allowing clinicians to pinpoint the site of injury while minimizing impact on surrounding tissues. During my PhD, I have been interested in investigating the effects of patient spinal cord geometry on focused ultrasound wave propagation.

The spinal cord has varying acoustic properties so understanding the behavior of focused ultrasound wave propagation for each patient requires computational simulations. I’ve developed image processing pipelines to convert spinal cord ultrasound images from patients into computational grids for numerical solvers.These simulations are crucial for non-invasively inferring the biological effects of transducer placement, especially when treating a sensitive organ such as the spinal cord.

My research in this topic was awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2023 IEEE Neuroengineering Conference and was selected for a podium talk at the 2023 SPIE Conference on Medical Imaging! More details on these publications can be found at these links: IEEE and SPIE.