At present, ultrasound radiation is broadly employed in medicine for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes at various frequencies and intensities. In this review article, we focus on therapeutically-active nanoparticles (NPs) when stimulated by ultrasound. We first introduce the different ultrasound-based therapies with special attention to the techniques involved in the oncological field, then we summarize the different NPs used, ranging from soft materials, like liposomes or micro/nano-bubbles, to metal and metal oxide NPs. We therefore focus on the sonodynamic therapy and on the possible working mechanisms under debate of NPs-assisted sonodynamic treatments. We support the idea that various, complex and synergistics physical–chemical processes take place during acoustic cavitation and NP activation. Different mechanisms are therefore responsible for the final cancer cell death and strongly depends not only on the type and structure of NPs or nanocarriers, but also on the way they interact with the ultrasonic pressure waves. We conclude with a brief overview of the clinical applications of the various ultrasound therapies and the related use of NPs-assisted ultrasound in clinics, showing that this very innovative and promising approach is however still at its infancy in the clinical cancer treatment.

目前，超声波辐射在医学上广泛用于各种频率和强度的诊断和治疗目的。在这篇综述文章中，我们重点关注超声波刺激时具有治疗活性的纳米粒子（NP）。我们首先介绍不同的基于超声的疗法，特别关注肿瘤领域涉及的技术，然后总结所使用的不同纳米颗粒，从软材料（如脂质体或微/纳米气泡）到金属和金属氧化物纳米颗粒。因此，我们重点关注声动力疗法以及纳米粒子辅助声动力疗法争论中可能的工作机制。我们支持这样的观点，即声空化和纳米颗粒活化过程中会发生各种、复杂和协同的物理化学过程。因此，不同的机制导致癌细胞最终死亡，并且不仅很大程度上取决于纳米颗粒或纳米载体的类型和结构，而且还取决于它们与超声波压力波相互作用的方式。最后，我们简要概述了各种超声疗法的临床应用以及纳米粒子辅助超声在临床中的相关使用，表明这种非常创新和有前途的方法在临床癌症治疗中仍处于起步阶段。