Okhai, T: Of Thermo-Active Oncology Probes

Over the last few years, there has been a growing need to advance the use of thermal ablation therapy as a minimally invasive technique in cancer management. Consequently, this work was done to investigate the use of hyperthermia and hypothermia by developing economical probes that will effectively destroy volumes of pathological tumours. While work on the cryotherapy probe is still on-going, the RF thermal probe was tested on different tissues and evaluated for effective tissue destruction capability. The results show that, at power settings of 20 watts for soft tissue, 13 watts for kidney tissue, 6 watts for liver tissue, 3 watts for brain tissue and 2 watts for lung tissue, the RF thermal probe effectively destroys volumes of pathological tumours within a temperature range of 50 to 100 degrees centigrade during a 15-minute treatment time. This work should help shed more light on the two energy-based treatment methods investigated, and should be of particular interest to interventional radiologists, researchers in the field of thermal ablation therapy, and cancer patients who are considering the use of energy-based therapy as alternative treatment methods.