AUTHOR=Mariappan Panchatcharam , B Gangadhara , Flanagan Ronan TITLE=A point source model to represent heat distribution without calculating the Joule heat during radiofrequency ablation JOURNAL=Frontiers in Thermal Engineering VOLUME=2 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/thermal-engineering/articles/10.3389/fther.2022.982768 DOI=10.3389/fther.2022.982768 ISSN=2813-0456 ABSTRACT=
Numerous liver cancer oncologists suggest bridging therapies to limit cancer growth until donors are available. Interventional radiology including radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is one such bridging therapy. This locoregional therapy aims to produce an optimal amount of heat to kill cancer cells, where the heat is produced by a radiofrequency (RF) needle. Less experienced Interventional Radiologists (IRs) require a software-assisted smart solution to predict the optimal heat distribution as both overkilling and untreated cancer cells are problematic treatments. Therefore, two of the big three partial differential equations, 1) heat equation (Pennes, Journal of Applied Physiology, 1948, 1, 93–122) to predict the heat distribution and 2) Laplace equation (Prakash, Open Biomed. Eng. J., 2010, 4, 27–38) for electric potential along with different cell death models (O’Neill et al., Ann. Biomed. Eng., 2011, 39, 570–579) are widely used in the last three decades. However, solving two differential equations and a cell death model is computationally expensive when the number of finite compact coverings of a liver topological structure increases in millions. Since the heat source from the Joule losses
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