Local cavitation induced vessel wall injury and its potential application in developing atherosclerosis model

According to the postulated "response to injury theory" of atherosclerosis, atherosclerosis develops as a result of repetitive injury and ongoing inflammatory process of the inner arterial wall (endothelial layer) of large and medium-size arteries. Many previous studies results show that the interaction of ultrasound with microbubbles in small vessel could cause endothelial cell dysfunction and injury. In this paper, artery mimicking vessel phantom experiment were conducted to confirm whether microbubbles enhanced cavitation could induce vessel wall injury in a high speed flowing vessel similar to the condition in rabbit abdominal aorta. In addition, preliminary rabbit abdominal aorta injury was performed by microbubbles and phase-shifted nanodroplets enhanced focused ultrasound (FU) cavitation and traditional balloon injury separately. The results show that microbubble especially nanodroplets enhanced cavitation cause vessel wall damage in phantom and endothelium lesion in rabbit abdominal aorta. Thereby it might become an alternative and potential strategy to develop a localized atherosclerosis model at specific site by using FU cavitation induced endothelium damage.