Wavefront Shaping of Ultrasound Vortex through the Human Skull Enabled by Binary Acoustic Metasurfaces

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Hu, Zhongtao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Hu, Zhongtao
author_facet Hu, Zhongtao
contents Ultrasound vortices have rapidly expanded their applications to areas like particle trapping, contactless manipulation, acoustic communications. In ultrasonic imaging and therapy involving bone tissues, these vortex beams offer intriguing possibilities but transmitting them through bone (especially the skull) poses challenges. Traditional acoustic lenses were engineered to rectify skull-induced beam aberration, and their capacity was limited to generating only static ultrasound fields within the brain. To overcome this constraint, our study presents a novel method for transcranially steering focused ultrasound vortex using 3D printed binary acoustic metasurfaces (BAMs) with a thickness of 0.8 λ. We tackled the challenge of skull-induced phase aberration by computing the phase distribution via a time reversal technique, which concurrently enabled the generation of a steerable focused vortex inside an ex vivo human skull by adjusting the operating frequency. Both numerical and simulations experiments were conducted to validate the capabilities of BAMs. Furthermore, we explored the generation of higher-order topological charge acoustic vortices within the brain utilizing the BAM. This development paves the way for designing cost-effective particle-trapping systems, facilitating clot manipulation, and applying acoustic-radiation forces and torques within or across bone structures, thus presenting a new frontier for potential biomedical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12437
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wavefront Shaping of Ultrasound Vortex through the Human Skull Enabled by Binary Acoustic Metasurfaces
Hu, Zhongtao
Medical Physics
Applied Physics
Biological Physics
Ultrasound vortices have rapidly expanded their applications to areas like particle trapping, contactless manipulation, acoustic communications. In ultrasonic imaging and therapy involving bone tissues, these vortex beams offer intriguing possibilities but transmitting them through bone (especially the skull) poses challenges. Traditional acoustic lenses were engineered to rectify skull-induced beam aberration, and their capacity was limited to generating only static ultrasound fields within the brain. To overcome this constraint, our study presents a novel method for transcranially steering focused ultrasound vortex using 3D printed binary acoustic metasurfaces (BAMs) with a thickness of 0.8 λ. We tackled the challenge of skull-induced phase aberration by computing the phase distribution via a time reversal technique, which concurrently enabled the generation of a steerable focused vortex inside an ex vivo human skull by adjusting the operating frequency. Both numerical and simulations experiments were conducted to validate the capabilities of BAMs. Furthermore, we explored the generation of higher-order topological charge acoustic vortices within the brain utilizing the BAM. This development paves the way for designing cost-effective particle-trapping systems, facilitating clot manipulation, and applying acoustic-radiation forces and torques within or across bone structures, thus presenting a new frontier for potential biomedical applications.
title Wavefront Shaping of Ultrasound Vortex through the Human Skull Enabled by Binary Acoustic Metasurfaces
topic Medical Physics
Applied Physics
Biological Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12437