Experimental observations and numerical modeling of lipid-shell microbubbles with calcium-adhering moieties for minimally-invasive treatment of urinary stones

A novel treatment modality incorporating calcium-adhering microbubbles has recently entered human clinical trials as a new minimally-invasive approach to treat urinary stones. In this treatment method, lipid-shell gas-core microbubbles can be introduced into the urinary tract through a catheter. Lipid moities with calcium-adherance properties incorporated into the lipid shell facilitate binding to stones. The microbubbles can be excited by an extracorporeal source of quasi-collimated ultrasound. Alternatively, the microbubbles can be excited by an intraluminal source, such as a fiber-optic laser. With either excitation technique, calcium-adhering microbubbles can significantly increase rates of erosion, pitting, and fragmentation of stones. We report here on new experiments using high-speed photography to characterize microbubble expansion and collapse. The bubble geometry observed in the experiments was used as one of the initial shapes for the numerical modeling. The modeling showed that the bubble dynamics strongly depends on bubble shape and stand-off distance. For the experimentally observed shape of microbubbles, the numerical modeling showed that the collapse of the microbubbles was associated with pressure increases of some two-to-three orders of magnitude compared to the excitation source pressures. This in-vitro study provides key insights into the use of microbubbles with calcium-adhering moieties in treatment of urinary stones

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements