Formation of toroidal bubbles from acoustic droplet vaporization.

Acoustic droplet vaporization (ADV) is the selective vaporization of liquid microdroplets using ultrasound to produce stable gas bubbles. ADV is the primary mechanism in an ultrasound based cancer therapy, called gas embolotherapy, where the resulting bubbles are used to create localized occlusions leading to tumor necrosis. In this investigation, early time scale events including phase change are directly visualized using ultra-high speed imaging. Modulating elevated acoustic pressure or pulse length resulted in toroidal bubbles. For sufficiently short pulses (4 cycles at 7.5 MHz), toroidal bubble formation could be avoided, regardless of acoustic pressures tested.