Determination of electromagnetic phased-array driving signals for hyperthermia based on a steady-state temperature criterion

Electromagnetic phased arrays fan be used to preferentially heat tumors, po tentially providing clinical benefit in oncological applications. Synthesiz ing a temperature field that exposes cancerous cells to sufficiently elevat ed temperatures while not harming healthy cells is not a trivial problem, a nd can often be assisted by the use of computational models of the patient. In this paper, a method for determining phased-array driving signals that result in a clinically Favorable temperature distribution is presented. It is shown by example that simply focusing the power deposited over the tumor is not sufficient to guarantee that the peak temperature elevation occurs in the tumor in biological media. To remedy this, the temperature is predic ted by a simple computational model and directly optimized as a function of the phased-array driving signals, To facilitate this optimization, superpo sition principles are used for both the electromagnetic and thermal models to minimize the number of computationally intensive forward problems that m ust be solved.