Combined Radiation Acoustics and Ultrasound for Radiotherapy Guidance and Cancer Targeting

OVERVIEW

• Compatible with 3D-conformal RT, IMRT, VMAT, SBRT, FLASH-RT, and proton therapy; eliminates target uncertainty during treatment without adding extra radiation dose.
• Target Applications Include: Closed-loop adaptive radiation therapy; real-time tumor tracking and dose guidance; online FLASH-RT monitoring and quality assurance.

BACKGROUND

Delivering advanced radiation therapy is a delicate balancing act: care teams must precisely target tumors while sparing surrounding healthy tissues millimeters away. The challenge is that human bodies move—breathing, organ motion, and subtle tissue shifts during treatment cause real-time differences between the planned dose and what is actually delivered. Existing point-measurement tools like tiny sensors or films cannot show a full 3D map of the dose deep inside target tissues in real time. Without live visualization of where the beam energy is landing, clinicians face a persistent blind spot that risks under-dosing the tumor or inadvertently damaging critical healthy structures.

INNOVATION

This joint imaging platform solves the blind spot by listening to the sound of radiation itself. When high-energy radiation pulses hit tissue, the absorbed energy generates microscopic sound waves. Using specialized grid-like sensors, the system captures these sound waves to build real-time 3D/4D dose maps deep within tissue (detecting doses down to ~10 cGy at depths up to 25 cm). By overlaying this dose map directly onto live ultrasound scans, care teams gain a simultaneous view of moving body structures and exact radiation patterns. The platform also works with ultra-fast FLASH radiation (greater than 40 Gy/s) by detecting individual beam pulses. By using standard ultrasound hardware instead of complex MRI-guided systems, it seamlessly integrates into existing workflows to turn traditional radiation machines into smart, self-correcting delivery systems.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

REFERENCES

Cuneo, K. C., Zhang, W., Litzenberg, D., Huang, Y., Hadley, S., Oraiqat, I., Chang, K.-W., Gonzalez, G., Dykstra, S., Zhang, M., Moros, E. G., Carson, P. L., El Naqa, I., & Wang, X. (2026). Clinical pilot study of ionizing radiation acoustic imaging for real-time visualization of radiation therapy dose delivery in cancer patients. International Journal of Radiation OncologyBiologyPhysics, 125(3), 959–969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrobp.2025.12.006

Huang, Y., Oraiqat, I., Litzenberg, D., Karthikesh, M. S., Tichacek, C., Gonzalez, G., Xu, Z., Dykstra, S., Li, B., Hadley, S., Moros, E. G., Zhang, M., Carson, P. L., Cuneo, K. C., Wang, X., El Naqa, I., & Zhang, W. (2025). Ionizing radiation acoustic and ultrasound dual-modality imaging for visualization of dose on anatomical structures during radiotherapy. Photoacoustics, 44, Article 100742. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacs.2025.100742

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

US12102843B2