3D-printed adaptive acoustic lens as a disruptive technology for transcranial ultrasound therapy using single-element transducers

The development of multi-element arrays for better control of the shape of ultrasonic beams has opened the way for focusing through highly aberrating media, such as the human skull. As a result, the use of brain therapy with transcranial-focused ultrasound has rapidly grown. Although effective, such technology is expensive. We propose a disruptive, low-cost approach that consists of focusing a 1 MHz ultrasound beam through a human skull with a single-element transducer coupled with a tailored silicone acoustic lens cast in a 3D-printed mold and designed using computed tomography-based numerical acoustic simulation. We demonstrate on N = 3 human skulls that adding lens-based aberration correction to a single-element transducer increases the deposited energy on the target 10 fold.