Even though its full potential is still unknown, the emergence of hyperthermia as an adjuvant cancer therapy has been an exciting clinical development. Hyperthermia is synergistic with conventional radiation and chemotherapies, acting to enhance their therapeutic benefits. However, the evaluation of hyperthermia as a treatment modality has remained elusive not only due to the fact that present equipment cannot consistently produce elevated temperatures in tumors, but also because it is difficult to determine the extent to which therapeutic temperatures have been reached during a typical treatment session. This state-of- affairs has magnified the need for tools to (1) evaluate the performance in patients of present heat delivery systems, (2) accelerate the clinical ability to deliver more consistent heat therapy and (3) assess the best ways to heat specific tumor sites in the clinic. The major goal of this project is to provide such tools to the clinical community in the form of 3D treatment planning softwares.
The specific aims of the research center on the development, characterization, and application of this software in order to (i) improve the quality of deep electromagnetic heating as currently practiced in the clinic for abdominal and pelvic tumors, especially prostatic carcinomas the treatment of which are top priorities at the National Cancer Institute (ii) improve the basic understanding of heating rate distributions produced during regional hyperthermia in these anatomical sites, (iii) evaluate the effectiveness of finite element methods as treatment planning aids in the delivery of electromagnetic hyperthermia to these regions and (iv) investigate site specific applicator systems and theoretically evaluate their overall clinical potential. The core activities of the project are retrospective analyses of patient treatments which fared poorly due to pain limitations or unexplained failure to heat, optimization of alternative treatment strategies including the development of treatment planning techniques which are adaptive over the time-course of therapy delivery and experimental verification of computational models though laboratory studies designed to test specific model attributes. There is a strong rationale to pursue these investigations with computer simulations of hyperthermia treatments and to believe that they will aid in the maturation of hyperthermia equipment and its use for clinical trials. Further, analyses of clinical treatments are essential for quantifying heating technologies so that clinical trials which test hyperthermia efficacy rather than ability to heat can be developed.
