Ultrasound Cavitation (US) has extended use in bioengineering.

Lithotripsy to treat kidney stones, ultrasonic imaging to view the inside of the body and root canal treatment to deal with infections at the centre of a tooth, are only a few of the already existing applications which use technology that is based on the physics of ultrasound cavitation.

Nevertheless, there are still a lot of unanswered questions regarding cavitation and its effects, and the related technology is not yet ready for wide adoption. Therefore, studying the science behind the physical phenomena of ultrasound cavitation may further define the future of many clinical applications. To that purpose, UCOM is investigating in depth how the bubbles interact with tissues, aiming to provide a safe way to use ultrasound cavitation in the existing medical applications. This is crucial since cavitation may be harmful if not controlled properly. For example, in lithotripsy a wrong choice of the applied acoustic wave parameters can cause damage to the kidney. Additionally, the UCOM research results may contribute to the development of more medical applications, e.g., sonoporation and sonoprinting.

The UCOM researchers develop, improve, and validate new state-of-the-art cavitation models and interaction with soft materials (e.g., tissues) against both existing and new experimental data to reply to the long-lasting open questions:

(1) Can fundamental experimental studies be designed to allow the temperatures developing during bubble collapse be quantified by measurement/simulation?

(2) Can new state-of-the-art, experimentally validated, computational models which couple fluid dynamics, chemistry and soft material mechanics, simulate the interactions of shockwaves, cavitating bubbles and soft matter in the aforementioned applications?

(3) What is the cavitation threshold of tissues and how can we control cavitation in Tissue Mimicking Materials (TMM) that will allow the relevant experiments to be conducted in vitro?