Sheth, Mihir;
Knight, Caed;
Wu, Qiang;
Vasilyeva, Alexandra;
Upadhyay, Awaneesh;
Bau, Luca;
Ruan, Jia-Ling;
... Stride, Eleanor; + view all
(2025)
Size matters: Micro- versus nanobubbles in ultrasound imaging and therapy.
Science Advances
, 11
(29)
, Article eads2177. 10.1126/sciadv.ads2177.
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Abstract
This study investigates the reported ability of nanobubbles (<500 nanometers in diameter) to exhibit a comparable or superior acoustic response to microbubbles (>1 micrometer in diameter). Eight hypotheses were examined. Both the theoretical and experimental results supported only one hypothesis: The apparent echogenicity of nanobubbles under both linear and nonlinear imaging is due to the presence of preexisting microbubbles, which are not reliably detected by available nanoparticle sizing methods. There was no evidence to support the other hypotheses, although the possibility of microbubble formation due to bubble aggregation/coalescence or swelling due to gas absorption in vivo could not be completely ruled out. Nanobubbles may offer advantages in terms of circulatory stability and potential for therapeutic delivery compared with microbubbles, but these advantages must be weighed against the need to use higher bubble concentrations, higher ultrasound frequencies, and/or higher intensities to achieve equivalent imaging and/or therapeutic effects.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Size matters: Micro- versus nanobubbles in ultrasound imaging and therapy |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1126/sciadv.ads2177 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads2177 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Mathematics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211538 |
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