Microbubbles-based contrast media is administrated intravenously into the patient blood stream during the ultrasonography examination. Due to their size, the microbubbles remain confined in blood vessels without extravasating towards the interstitial fluid. An ultrasound contrast media is therefore purely intravascular, making it an ideal agent to image organ microvasculature for diagnostic purposes. A typical clinical use of contrast ultrasonography is detection of a hypervascular metastatic tumor, which exhibits a contrast uptake (kinetics of microbubbles concentration in blood circulation) faster than healthy biological tissue surrounding the tumor. Other clinical applications using contrast exist, as in echocardiography to improve delineation of left ventricle for visualizing contractibility of heart muscle after a myocardial infarction. Finally, applications in quantitative perfusion (relative measurement of blood flow) have emerged for identifying early patient response to anti-cancerous drug treatment (methodology and clinical study by Dr. Nathalie Lassau in 2011), enabling the best oncological therapeutic options to be determined.
