The Power of Numerical Simulations in Advancing Treatment Planning during Microwave Hyperthermia

Today, fruitful research in biomedicine and rapid advancement of technology empower humanity to successfully treat numerous diseases. Nevertheless, the question of finding a safe and universal strategy of treating cancer still tops the list of urgent issues in healthcare. The need to always balance on the risk-benefit border while using conventional treatment methods due to their side effects has led to the initiation of research targeted at exploration of more sophisticated and delicate treatment strategies. One of the established and promising methods is microwave hyperthermia. It uses an increase in temperature caused by electromagnetic waves to destroy cancer cells. The main biological effects of hyperthermia include increase in blood perfusion, leading to an increase in the uptake of chemotherapy drugs in the tumor area, as well as oxygenation of tumor cells, which increases the sensitivity of cells to radiotherapy. Other effects are, for example, activation of the immune system, denaturation of proteins, and limitation of the ability of tumor cells to repair their damaged DNA. Practical implementation of this concept was successful, although there is still demand for new and more effective strategies for hyperthermic treatment planning. Therefore, the main objective of this work was the development of the tool that would facilitate this task. To achieve this, a 2-D realistic patient model based on a numerical phantom was successfully implemented in the programming environment MATLAB. The numerical nature of the model allowed to introduce the Finite-Difference-Time-Domain-based algorithm to simulate electromagnetic field from each energy source as well as the specific absorption rate in the model resulting from source activity. The performance of the developed simulator was successfully verified by the commercial simulation software COMSOL Multiphysics. The tool can be used both in research settings for investigating the performance of various treatment planning strategies and as a part of treatment planning and controlling software for real-world microwave hyperthermia systems.