Planning, optimisation and evaluation of hyperthermia treatments

Abstract

Background: Hyperthermia treatment planning using dedicated simulations of power and temperature distributions is very useful to assist in hyperthermia applications. This paper describes an advanced treatment planning software package for a wide variety of applications. Methods: The in-house developed C++ software package Plan2Heat runs on a Linux operating system. Modules are available to perform electric field and temperature calculations for many heating techniques. The package also contains optimisation routines, post-treatment evaluation tools and a sophisticated thermal model enabling to account for 3D vasculature based on an angiogram or generated artificially using a vessel generation algorithm. The use of the software is illustrated by a simulation of a locoregional hyperthermia treatment for a pancreatic cancer patient and a spherical tumour model heated by interstitial hyperthermia, with detailed 3D vasculature included. Results: The module-based set-up makes the software flexible and easy to use. The first example demonstrates that treatment planning can help to focus the heating to the tumour. After optimisation, the simulated absorbed power in the tumour increased with 50%. The second example demonstrates the impact of accurately modelling discrete vasculature. Blood at body core temperature entering the heated volume causes relatively cold tracks in the heated volume, where the temperature remains below 40 °C. Conclusions: A flexible software package for hyperthermia treatment planning has been developed, which can be very useful in many hyperthermia applications. The object-oriented structure of the source code allows relatively easy extension of the software package with additional tools when necessary for future applications.