Pre-clinical Modelling and Simulation of Hepatic Radiofrequency Ablation

S. Singh [1], R. Repaka [1], ,
[1] Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India.
Published in 2015

Radio-Frequency ablation (RFA) has received a considerable interest as a minimally invasive treatment technique used for destruction of a variety of primary and metastatic hepatic tumors. A parametric study of hepatic radio-frequency ablation using three-dimensional numerical models has been done in order to determine the optimal value of applied energy (in terms of power and treatment time) adequate to ablate the target tumor for different stages of liver cancer. The induced thermal damage has been quantified by employing the first-order Arrhenius rate equation. Effects of variable conductivity and blood perfusion have also been addressed in this study. The finite element analysis revealed that, the effective damage of tumor volume depends on input power, treatment time and tumor size. It has been confirmed that temperature isotherms and tissue damage patterns are not synonymous. These results may be useful to provide practical and fast guidelines to clinical practitioners.