Computational study on focused microwave thermotherapy for knee pathological treatment

Abstract

This study is a computational study on focused microwave thermotherapy for knee pathological treatment using the time reversal (TR) principle in musculoskeletal disorders. The authors presented a modified TR algorithm with amplitude compensation for an accurate beam focusing of the knee tumour location in a lossy medium. Furthermore, they proposed a new approach called the truncated threshold method, which could be used to apply an effective beam focusing on a tumour location in the knee while the unwanted hot spots are controlled in the normal tissue region. Compared to the other existing methods, this new approach has the advantages of being implemented simply in the unwanted hot spot control and having a similar performance to the beam focusing on the target location. The application of the proposed algorithm and the new hot spot control method to knee pathological tissue achieved acceptable electromagnetic (EM) and thermal results. The anatomical based two-dimensional (2D) knee model for the simulation analysis was implemented using a segmentation result of the Korean human body model obtained from magnetic resonance imaging. 2D finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic and thermal solvers were developed and applied to conduct the 915MHz focused microwave thermotherapy for knee pathological treatment.