A Bayesian approach for energy-based estimation of acoustic aberrations in high intensity focused ultrasound treatment

High intensity focused ultrasound is a non-invasive method for treatment of diseased tissue that uses a beam of ultrasound in order to generate heat within a small volume. A common challenge in application of this technique is that heterogeneity of the biological medium can defocus the ultrasound beam. In this study, the problem of refocusing the beam is reduced to the Bayesian inverse problem of estimating the acoustic aberration due to the biological tissue from acoustic radiative force imaging data. The solution to this problem is a posterior probability density on the aberration which is sampled using a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm. The framework is tested using both a synthetic and experimental dataset. This new approach has the ability to obtain a good estimate of the aberrations from a small dataset, as little as 32 sonication tests, which can lead to significant speedup in the treatment process. Furthermore, this framework is very flexible and can work with a wide range of sonication tests and so it can be used alongside existing energy-based techniques.