Master's thesis and projects

Master's thesis and projects

– Ultrasound technology

The Department of circulation and medical imaging offers projects and master's thesis topics for technology students of most of the different technical study programmes at NTNU. There is a seperate page for the supplementary specialisation courses.

List of topics

Topics for thesis and projects are given below. Most of the topics can be adjusted to the students qualifications and wishes.

Don't hesitate to take contact with the corresponding supervisor - we're looking forward to a discussion with you!

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null Ultrasound Mediated Drug Delivery

Ultrasound Mediated Drug Delivery

Figure 1: Micrograph of a capillary (red), nanoparticles (blue), free drug molecules that have entered into cells (green), and cells without drugs (black).Figure 1: Micrograph of a capillary (red), nanoparticles (blue), free drug molecules that have entered into cells (green), and cells without drugs (black).
Ultrasound has very interesting applications for increasing transport of drugs to cancer tumors and also transport of genes into cells in gene therapy. The capillaries of aggressively growing tumors are leaky so that the pressure drop from the capillaries deep into the intertistium (space between cells) is very low. Transport of drugs from the capillaries to the cells is therefore mainly produced by diffusion, which is a slow process. Ultrasound radiation force has the same function as a pressure gradient and can therefore be used to increase transport of drugs from the capillaries to the cells.

The leaky capillary walls opens for packaging the drugs into nanoparticles (diam ~ 100 nm) that leak out of the tumor capillaries, but not out of normal capillaries, hence protecting normal tissue against the drug. The 1st Figure shows a micrograph of a capillary in red, with some nanoparticles in blue, and free drug molecules that have entered into cells in green. The black areas are cells without drugs. We note that the nanoparticles are found close to the capillaries due to lack of pressure gradient.

Figure 2: Ultrasound radiation force is very useful to improve the transport of particles and molecular drugs away from capillaries.Figure 2: Ultrasound radiation force is very useful to improve the transport of particles and molecular drugs away from capillaries.
Ultrasound radiation force is therefore very useful to improve the transport of particles and molecular drugs away from the capillaries, as illustrated in the 2nd Figure.

Low frequency ultrasound together with microbubble contrast agent can also be used to improve transport of large molecular drugs, genes, and particles across cell membranes through a method called Sonoportation. This method can also be used to improve transport of drugs into brain tumors, that is hampered due to the blood brain barrier of the cerebral capillaries. Multifrequency ultrasound hence has many interesting applications in cancer and gene therapy, presenting many interesting thesis topics within nonlinear ultrasound propagation and tissue interaction, design of high power multiband ultrasound transducer arrays. The work is done in collaboration with professor Catharina Davies at Department of Physics, and also other groups in acoustics and mathematics at SINTEF and NTNU for simulation and design of acoustic experiments in relation to drug delivery probelms. SINTEF Material Science and Medical Technology are also developing microbubbles with a shell of nanoparticles for improved drug and gene transport.

There are several interesting Master and PhD topics in this field, ranging from

  • multi-frequency ultrasound acoustics and transducer arrays for imaging of particles and stimulated transport and breakage of the particles
  • signal processing for multi-frequency ultrasound imaging (SURF Imaging) of the particles
  • combined optical imaging of particles with ultrasound mediated drug delivery
  • experimental studies of ultrasound mediated transport and breakage of gas micro-bubbles and drug encapsulating nano-particles in lab models and small animal tumor models

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