title: Current state of the art of regional hyperthermia treatment planning: a review.
abstract: Locoregional hyperthermia, i.e. increasing the tumor temperature to 40-45 °C using an external heating device, is a very effective radio and chemosensitizer, which significantly improves clinical outcome. There is a clear thermal dose-effect relation, but the pursued optimal thermal dose of 43 °C for 1 h can often not be realized due to treatment limiting hot spots in normal tissue. Modern heating devices have a large number of independent antennas, which provides flexible power steering to optimize tumor heating and minimize hot spots, but manual selection of optimal settings is difficult. Treatment planning is a very valuable tool to improve locoregional heating. This paper reviews the developments in treatment planning software for tissue segmentation, electromagnetic field calculations, thermal modeling and optimization techniques. Over the last decade, simulation tools have become more advanced. On-line use has become possible by implementing algorithms on the graphical processing unit, which allows real-time computations. The number of applications using treatment planning is increasing rapidly and moving on from retrospective analyses towards assisting prospective clinical treatment strategies. Some clinically relevant applications will be discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. h.p.kok@amc.uva.nl.
authors.forename: H P
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Kok
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany. peter.wust@charite.de.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wust
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. paul.stauffer@jefferson.edu.
authors.forename: P R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Stauffer
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. bardati@disp.uniroma2.it.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bardati
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Erasmus MC Cancer Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. g.c.vanrhoon@erasmusmc.nl.
authors.forename: G C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: van Rhoon
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. h.crezee@amc.uva.nl.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Crezee
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D006979:Hyperthermia, Induced / Q000379:methods*; D013813:Therapy, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*