ИСТИНА

Boiling histotripsy (BH) is a promising technology for transrectal mechanical ablation of localized prostate cancer. BH uses sequences of milliseconds-long pulses to generate high-amplitude shocks in acoustic pressure waveforms at the focus, resulting in non-thermal liquefaction of pathological tissue. Despite successful pilot experiments on BH ablation of fresh human prostate, a critical problem remains on determining the threshold values of the BH-dose (the number of pulses per focus for specific exposure protocols) sufficient for tissue ablation. This threshold depends on the stiffness of tissue, which varies in different patients and different prostate tissue types. Here, BH lesions were induced in ex vivo prostate tissue samples (n = 14) with different values of shear modulus and using different BH doses. The 2-MHz transducer operated with exposure parameters: 10-ms pulses, 1% duty cycle, and 10–40 pulses/point. After sonication, the samples were analyzed histologically to assess cell destruction. The experiment demonstrated varying completeness of tissue liquefaction for various BH-dose depending on the tissue stiffness. [Work supported by RSF 21-72-00067.]