Computer aided design of miniaturized antennas for microwave cardiac ablation

This paper discusses methods of designing miniaturized antennas for the application of microwave ablation for the cure of cardiac arrhythmias. Finite Difference Time Domain and Finite Element methods are used to first design and optimize miniaturized antennas. The overall size of the antennas has 2.5 mm outer diameter that is suitable for intravenous catheterization delivery. The bioheat transfer equation is solved using the finite difference method and its predicted temperature results are compared with the results obtained from the in-vivo experiments. Using the combination of electromagnetic and temperature modelling, the predicted results are used to optimise the near-electric-field pattern of the antenna to ensure optimum microwave energy deposition into targeted myocardium. The in-vivo experiments at 2.45 GHz show that the lesion created using the proposed antenna are far superior in both width and depth as compared to the published results.