A novel antenna configuration for microwave hyperthermia

Abstract

Breast cancer affects approximately 2.5 million women each year and the consequences can be fatal. When treated correctly, however, the survival rates are very high. Surgical operation such as lumpectomy or mastectomy are invasive techniques that remove the partial or the whole breast. With early diagnosed cancers and the post-surgical patients, the most used therapy techniques are the radiotherapy, chemotherapy and the use of other anti-cancer agents. The economic and the psychological repercussions may be minimized by the increase efficiency of the treatments. It has been shown that with the artificial hyperthermia, elevated temperature levels at the cancer regions, the effectiveness of these modalities increase. Microwave breast hyperthermia (MH) aims to increase the temperature at the tumor location over its normal levels. During the procedure, the unwanted heated regions called hotspots can occur. The main aim of the MH is to prevent the hotspots while obtaining the necessary temperature at the tumor. Absorbed heat energy per kilogram at the breast, specific absorption rate (SAR), needs to be adjusted for a controlled MH. The choice of the MH applicator design is important for a superior energy focus on the target. Although hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) changes for every patient, the MH applicator is required to be effective for different breast models and tumor types. In the first part of the thesis, the linear antenna arrays are implemented as MH applicators. We presented the focusing maps as an application guide for MH focusing by adjusting the antenna phase values. Furthermore, these focusing maps put forward the basic principle of focusing the energy at the breast. Sub-grouping the antenna, we obtained two phase main parameters that control the horizontal and vertical focus change. By adjusting these two phase values, we could focus the energy onto the target locations and we showed that with this simple structure, there is no need for optimization methods. However, the linear applicator performance was not successful for some target points, especially when the target is far away from both of the arrays. In the second part of the thesis, we improved the linear MH applicator. We concluded that the reason for the low performance of the linear applicator is mainly due to non-symmetrical geometry of the applicator and the resulting poor coverage. we proposed to radially re-adjust the position of the linear applicator for a better focusing ability while fixing the breast phantom. This generates multiple different applicator scheme without actually changing the applicator design. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is used for antenna excitation parameter selection. For the examined two targets, 135° rotated linear applicator gave 35-84% higher T BRS and 21-28% higher T BRT values than the fixed linear applicator, where T BRS stands for the target-to-breast SAR ratio and T BRT stands for the target-to-breast temperature ratio. Not only the rotated linear applicator gave higher performance, but also the circular array is rotated and the results were improved for one target. One of the main results of this study is that, for one target, the rotated linear applicator gave better results than the circular array, which is the state of the art. For the deep-seated target, 135° rotated linear applicator has 80% higher T BRS and 59% higher T BRT than the circular applicator with the same number of antennas. For the other target, the results of the linear and circular were comparable. However, the results obtained with the PSO were not robust. With different initial values (random in our study), the results were very different from each other, and we did 10 repetitions and took the best performing results. In the third part of the thesis, we presented deep-learning based antenna excitation parameter selection method. This method utilizes the learning ability of convolutional neural networks (CNN), rather than searching the solution space from random initial values as PSO does. The data set for CNN training was collected by superposing the electric fields obtained from individual antenna elements. We implemented a realistic breast phantom with and without a tumor inclusion. We used linear and circular applicators to validate the method. CNNs were trained offline with the data sets created first for the phase and then for the amplitude of the antennas. A mask of 1s and 0s is used to define the target region to be focused. This mask was given as the input to CNN models, and the corresponding phase and the amplitude values are calculated within seconds from the CNN models. The proposed approach outperforms the look-up table results, as the phase-only optimization and phase–power-combined optimization show a 27% and 4% lower hotspot-to-target energy ratio, respectively, than the look-up table results for the linear MH applicator