Inverse Heat Transfer Analysis of Micro Heater Strength and Locations for Hyperthermia Treatment of Brain Tumors

Hyperthermia, also called thermal therapy or thermotherapy, is a type of cancer treatment in which the aim is to maintain the surrounding healthy tissue at physiologically normal temperatures and expose the cancerous region to high temperatures between 43°C–45°C. Several methods of hyperthermia are currently under study, including local, regional, and whole-body hyperthermia. In local hyperthermia, Interstitial techniques are used to treat tumors deep within the body, such as brain tumors. heat is applied to the tumor, usually by probes or needles which are inserted into the tumor. The heat source is then inserted into the probe. Invasive interstitial heating technique offer a number of advantages over external heating approaches for localizing heat into small tumors at depth. e. g interstitial technique allows the tumor to be heated to higher temperatures than external techniques. This is why an innovative internal hyperthermia research is being conducted in the design of an implantable microheater [1]. To proceed with this research we need complete and accurate data of the strength, number and location of the micro heaters, which is the objective of this paper. The location, strength, and number of implantable micro heaters for a given tumor size is calculated by solving an Inverse Heat Transfer Problem (IHTP). First we model the direct problem by calculating the transient temperature field via Pennies bioheat transfer equation. A nonlinear least-square method, modified by addition of a regularization term, Levenberg Marquardt method is used to determine the inverse problem [2].