A Laser-Coupled Dual Excitation Intravascular Ultrasound Transducer for Sonothrombolysis

In this paper, we first introduced a miniaturized dual excitation laser-coupled intravascular ultrasound transducer with both a piezoelectric stack and a laser ultrasound transducer, which can generate a low-frequency (425 kHz) and high-frequency (7.2 MHz) dual excitation waves for thrombolysis. The prototype transducer can generate peak-negative pressure (PNP) of about 3.0 MPa with 100 Vpp input voltage and 8.5 MPa with 1mJ laser energy input, respectively. The in-vitro thrombolysis showed improved clot mass reduction (61.74 ± 3.15 %) and clot lysis speed (63.12 ± 4.35 mg/min) of dual-excitation ultrasound treatment compared to piezo or laser-generated ultrasound alone treatment.