Suppression of therapeutic interference by using Barker code and adaptive notch filtering for real-time HIFU surgery and ultrasound imaging

Real-time ultrasound imaging during high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) surgery allows for tracking tissue movement and monitoring feedback from a treated target. However, the reflected HIFU interference signals deteriorate the quality of imaging signals received by an imaging transducer during simultaneous therapy and imaging. The purpose of this Letter is to demonstrate that those HIFU interference signals can be significantly reduced in the brightness-mode image by using a coded excitation scheme with adaptive notch filtering. A prototype integrated HIFU/imaging transducer was used to experimentally demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.