Thermal modelling of nonideal interstitial microwave antenna array hyperthermia for the treatment of cancer

In clinical hyperthermia, the 'ideal' parallel insertion of an interstitial antenna array for the treatment of cancer is virtually impossible. The effect of nonparallelism and variable antenna insertion depths on the electric fields, and thus the heating distributions produced by such arrays is investigated in the present work through the use of computational modeling. The degradation in SAR (specific absorption rate) patterns when one or more of the antennas are skewed from their 'ideal' configuration relative to the array is examined. In addition, the inhomogeneity of a tumor within a homogeneous tissue medium is considered. The contrasting electrical properties of the tumor to those of the surrounding medium will cause a scattering of the electric field patterns incident from the array. This incident electric field pattern from the array is first calculated. The scattering from the tumor is then used to obtain the total electric field produced, and thus the SAR distribution.< >