Rosa Scapaticci
Thermal ablation is an emerging cancer treatment, in which high temperatures are induced into the target zone, in order to create an irreversible thermal damage to localized malignancies. In particular, microwave thermal ablation (MTA), which uses electromagnetic field in the microwave frequency range as energy source, is gaining increasing interest in the clinical practice, owing to its minimal invasiveness and capability of treating large tissue volumes in short times. However, to achieve minimal invasiveness in MTA procedures, image guidance and temperature monitoring are crucial, being needed for planning, targeting, and real time monitoring of ablation therapy, so to decrease the risk for unwanted thermal damage, while assuring the proper treatment of cancerous areas. In fact, the lack of a reliable real-time temperature monitoring system remains, at present, one of the main shortcomings of MTA, as well as of the other percutaneous thermal ablation techniques.
Some of the imaging modalities currently exploited in clinical practice for diagnostic applications, such as ultrasounds and magnetic resonance imaging, have been proposed to address this issue, but they still suffer some limitations, related to low accuracy of the images or high costs and long times of the examination.
More recently, microwave imaging (MWI) has been proposed as an alternative low-cost and safe monitoring technique. MWI uses low power electromagnetic fields in the microwave frequency range to non-invasively inspect body tissues and mapping their electric variations with respect to a reference background. Based on the evidence that electromagnetic properties of ablated tissues undergo tangible and irreversible temperature-dependent decrease within the MW frequency range, MWI appears as a possible candidate to monitor thermal ablation therapies.
In this talk, potentialities and limitations of MWI to monitor thermal ablation therapies (and in particular MTA) will be illustrated, by reporting the results of a feasibility study and preliminary experimental tests on liver ablation monitoring by means of MWI technology.
