Acoustic and thermal simulations of tcMRgFUS in patient specific models: validation with experiments

Background/introduction In tcMRgFUS, acoustic and spatial heterogeneities of the skull cause reflection, attenuation, and phase aberrations of the acoustic beams, which may cause patient-specific thermal responses to the same transducer power. In this work, we use acoustic and thermal simulations based on patient-specific 3D heterogeneous tissue models to predict heating at the center of the brain. We validate the model through comparison of the simulated temperature rises to experimentally derived energies for five patients treated using tcMRgFUS. Further, we separate the components of energy loss in the acoustic simulations into reflection-only, attenuation-only, phase aberration-only, and reflection and attenuation both to understand the cause of potential inter-patient variability in these treatments.