Influence of the abdominal wall on the nonlinear propagation of focused therapeutic ultrasound

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 1 MHz transmitter with a radius of 30 mm can be reduced by about 14% at the focal plane.