The treatment conformability and the total treatment time of large tumors are both important issues in ultrasound thermal therapy. Previous heating strategies all show their restrictions in achieving these two issues to satisfactory levels simultaneously. This work theoretically presents a new heating strategy which is capable of both increasing the treatment conformability and shortening the treatment time, when using a 2D ultrasound phased array transducer. To perform this, a set of the multiple-foci patterns (considered the basic heating units) were temporally switched to steer the beam at different focal planes with the lesion length being well-controlled. Then, to conformally cover an irregular target volume, the 2D phased array was laterally shifted by a positioning system to deposit a suitable heating unit to cover a subvolume part. Results demonstrated that the totally treatment time can be largely reduced. The heating rate can be increased up to 0.96 cm(3)/min compared to the previously reported 0.26 cm(3)/min. Also, the proposed scheme showed that the tumor regions can be completely treated with the normal tissue damage at satisfactory level. The feasibility of the proposed strategy for irregular tumor treatment was also demonstrated. This study offers useful information in large tumor treatment in ultrasound thermal therapy.
