Evaluating histotripsy treatment dosage in the brain using MRI

Histotripsy is a non-invasive, non-thermal focused ultrasound ablation method that mechanically breaks down the target tissue into acellular debris and has shown promising results for brain surgery. Quantifying histotripsy treatment dosage is required to avoid over/under-treatment of the target region. In this work, we assess whether T1, T2 and ADC maps can be utilized to quantify the ablation effect generated by varying histotripsy dosage post-treatment using an ex-vivo bovine brain. We show that only the ADC map is able to visualize the histotripsy ablation. Increasing histotripsy dosage results in increasing ADC.