Micro-coaxial Monopole Antenna to Treat Bone Cancer: Design and Preliminary Experimentation

Although bone tumors can grow up in adults, they mostly affect young people. Most common treatments for bone tumors can present side effects which affects patients life quality. Currently, there are technological advances about oncological treatments based on the increase in temperature in the tumor. A monopole antenna to treat bone tumors was designed. The performance of the antenna was modeled by the finite element method (COMSOL Multiphysics). Electromagnetic and thermal simulations were performed to predict the heating areas generated by the antenna. The optimized antenna was fabricated from a UT-085 semi-rigid coaxial cable to match the simulated prototypes. A preliminary evaluation of the antenna was done by using bone and muscle tissue phantoms. The optimized Metal-Tip Monopole antenna (MTM) had a length of 120 mm with an inner conductor length of 0.5λ
_eff
. An input power of 5 W applied per 5 min were enough to generate therapeutic temperatures. A comparison between results from the simulation and the experimentation was done. In both cases, temperatures higher than 60°C were reached.