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
1 Fraunhofer MEVIS, Institute for Medical Image Computing, Bremen, Germany
2 CeVis, Center of Complex Systems and Visualization, University of Bremen, Germany
3 Chirurgische Klinik I, Charité – Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany
4 Jacobs University Bremen, Germany


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Creative Commons License
© Kröger et al.; Licensee Bentham Open.

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Fraunhofer MEVIS, Institute for Medical Image Computing, Bremen, Germany; E-mail: tim.kroeger@mevis.fraunhofer.de


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.

Keywords: Radiofrequency ablation, vascular cooling, fast prediction..