Safety first: progress in calibrating high-intensity focused ultrasound treatments

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is gaining rapid clinical acceptance, but as yet there is no consensus on calibration and methods for describing the acoustic fields involved, nor on descriptors of either the ultrasound exposure or dose. Well validated methods exist for measuring pressure and power in low amplitude fields, but some of these are not appropriate for the powers and field geometries used in HIFU. Although some technical challenges have been solved for transducers mounted in large water baths, the complex geometries used for clinical HIFU sources create further difficulties. Accurate calibration, and knowledge of the acoustic field in three dimensions is crucial to avoiding side effects caused by unintentional heating, and is important when treatments are to be compared.