Piezoelectric Single Crystal Ultrasonic Transducer for Endoscopic Drug Release in Gastric Mucosa

Modern advanced minimally invasive surgery has been implemented for most of the significant gastrointestinal diseases. However, patients with coagulopathy or unresectable tumors cannot be cured by current treatment methods. Moreover, other existing medical devices for targeted drug release are too large to be applied in gastric endoscope because the diameter of the biopsy channel is smaller than 3 mm. To address it, in this work, we developed a piezoelectric single crystal ultrasonic transducer (the diameter was only 2.2 mm and the mass was 0.076 g) to produce acoustic waves, which could promote the drug release in the designed position of the digestive tract through an endoscope. It exhibited the electromechanical coupling coefficient of 0.36 and the center frequency of 6.9 MHz with the -6-dB bandwidth of 23%. In in vitro sonophoresis experiment, the gastric mucosa permeability to Bovine Serum Albumin increased about 5.6 times when the ultrasonic transducer was activated at 40 V
_pp
and 60% duty ratio, proving that employment of this transducer could facilitate drug penetration in the gastric mucosa. Meanwhile, the permeability could be adjusted by tuning the duty ratio of the ultrasonic transducer. The corresponding sonophoresis mechanism was related to the acoustic streaming and the thermal effect produced by the transducer. In addition, the measured maximum power density was 128 mW/cm
²
and the mechanical index of the ultrasonic transducer was 0.02. The results held a great implication for applications of the transducer for targeted drug release in the gastrointestinal tract.