Field and Temperature Shaping for Microwave Hyperthermia: Recent Treatment Planning Tools to Enhance SAR-Based Procedures

Simple Summary Hyperthermia is a thermal cancer treatment that consists of a selective increase in the tumor temperature to a supra-physiological value for 60-90 min. Heating via microwaves using a phased array applicator proved to be a very useful, non-invasive energy carrier. Although hyperthermia is currently employed for many anatomical sites in combination with standard techniques, there are still open challenges that prevent its more widespread use in the clinic. The aim of this article is to review the work carried out in the framework of a national project concerning the introduction of new tools for microwave hyperthermia and to unify these approaches. The proposed methodologies are interconnected and potentially allow an improvement in treatment planning using a single device. The aim of the article is to provide a summary of the work carried out in the framework of a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Research. The main goal of the activity was to introduce multiple tools for reliable, affordable, and high-performance microwave hyperthermia for cancer therapy. The proposed methodologies and approaches target microwave diagnostics, accurate in vivo electromagnetic parameters estimation, and improvement in treatment planning using a single device. This article provides an overview of the proposed and tested techniques and shows their complementarity and interconnection. To highlight the approach, we also present a novel combination of specific absorption rate optimization via convex programming with a temperature-based refinement method implemented to mitigate the effect of thermal boundary conditions on the final temperature map. To this purpose, numerical tests were carried out for both simple and anatomically detailed 3D scenarios for the head and neck region. These preliminary results show the potential of the combined technique and improvements in the temperature coverage of the tumor target with respect to the case wherein no refinement is adopted.