Cavitation Endothelium Damage of Large Artery Vessel: A Potential Application to Animal Model of Atherosclerosis

Abstract

Mechanical arterial balloon injury combined with hypercholesterolemia is the most widely and frequently employed method to induce atherosclerosis in animal models. But it is not suitable to generate a localized eccentric plaque at a specific site. In this paper, experiments were conducted to confirm whether focused ultrasound (FU) induced cavitation could cause endothelium lesion in rabbit abdominal aorta and thereby became an alternative approach to induce atherosclerosis. The cavitation damages induced by commercial microbubbles and phase-shifted nanodroplets under focused ultrasound exposure in wall-less vessel phantom and isolated rabbit abdominal aorta segment were studied. The results will provide a potential strategy to develop a localized atherosclerosis model at specific site by using FU cavitation induced endothelium damage.