Ultrasonic beam focusing through tissue inhomogeneities with a time reversal mirror: application to transskull therapy

Time reversal of ultrasonic fields allows a very efficient approach to focus pulsed ultrasonic waves through lossless inhomogeneous media. Time reversal mirrors (TRMs) are made of large transducer arrays, allowing the incident field to be sampled, time reversed, and reemitted. Time reversal method corrects for phase, amplitude, and even shape aberration and thus, is more efficient than time shift compensation techniques. However, this technique needs the knowledge of the Green's function of a dominant scatterer available in the medium. Aberration correction for ultrasonic hyperthermia could be achieved by combining TRM with an artificial acoustic source or sensor implanted inside the treatment volume. In this paper, time reversal method has been experimentally applied to the focusing through the skull bone. It is shown that the skull induces severe attenuation of ultrasound and reduces the efficiency of the time reversal approach. Then, an amplitude correction method is proposed to focus through an attenuating layer located close to the array. This method consists in inversing the amplitude modulation and then time reversing these signals. Finally, this method is combined with numerical backpropagation to compensate for an attenuating layer located some distance away from the transducer array.