Vessel phantom fabrication using rapid prototyping technique for investigating thermal dosage profile in HIFU surgery

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for fabricating tumor vessel phantom and then investigate the thermal dosage profile caused by high‐intensity‐focused ultrasound (HIFU) surgery.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a thermal sensitive powder has been added to silicon‐based gel as a vessel phantom raw material for displaying the thermal dosage profile caused by HIFU. A fused deposition modeling system was used for fabricating the shell casting mold and the vessel arbor mold. The arbor prototype, made of wax, was solidified in the cavity of vessel arbor mold. The vessel phantom object embedded with the arbor prototype was created in the shell mold casting process. The vessel phantom was obtained by immersing the vessel phantom object into hot water (65°C) for melting the vessel arbor prototype. A HIFU experiment has been conducted for verifying the feasibility of displaying the thermal dosage profile of the fabricated vessel phantom. The HIFU experimental parameters including the driving power of HIFU transducer, ultrasound exposure duration and volume flow rate were used for investigating the thermal dosage variation by the perfusion of vessel phantom.

Findings

The properties of fabricated mimicking phantom agree well with those of human tissue. The experimental results show that the proposed method can fabricate the Y‐type vessel phantom. The proposed method has been proved as a promising fabrication process in fabricating the vessel phantom and it displays the thermal dosage profile in HIFU experiment.

Originality/value

The proposed method and the developed experimental apparatus are helpful for pre‐clinical HIFU surgery.

Citation

Jiang, C. (2010), "Vessel phantom fabrication using rapid prototyping technique for investigating thermal dosage profile in HIFU surgery", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 417-423. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552541011083335