RESEARCH ARTICLE
Fast Estimation of the Vascular Cooling in RFA Based on Numerical Simulation
T. Kröger*, 1, T. Pätz1, I. Altrogge2, A. Schenk1, K.S. Lehmann3, B.B. Frericks3, J.-P. Ritz3, H.-O. Peitgen1, 2, T. Preusser1, 4
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 16
Last Page: 26
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-4-16
DOI: 10.2174/1874120701004010016
Article History:
Received Date: 17/9/2009Revision Received Date: 22/11/2009
Acceptance Date: 28/12/2009
Electronic publication date: 4/2/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
We present a novel technique to predict the outcome of an RF ablation, including the vascular cooling effect. The main idea is to separate the problem into a patient independent part, which has to be performed only once for every applicator model and generator setting, and a patient dependent part, which can be performed very fast. The patient independent part fills a look-up table of the cooling effects of blood vessels, depending on the vessel radius and the distance of the RF applicator from the vessel, using a numerical simulation of the ablation process. The patient dependent part, on the other hand, only consists of a number of table look-up processes. The paper presents this main idea, along with the required steps for its implementation. First results of the computation and the related ex-vivo evaluation are presented and discussed. The paper concludes with future extensions and improvements of the approach.