Towards quality assured hyperthermia treatment delivery

To ensure high quality treatment, the accuracy and the stability of any system has to be evaluated prior to clinical use.Another important factor of accurate treatment delivery is a graphical user interface (GUI) which secures against any possible misinterpretation while providing comprehensive information about the treatment.In this project, we worked on stability estimation and GUI development of hyperthermia system.For stability estimation, routine calibrations were performed and the channel performance was measured for a duration of one month.From the long time measurement we have found that the system performance is stable up to one month in both phase and power contrast.The best, worst and intermediate performing channels were identified for further analysis.By mean of a short time measurement on these three channels we have found the worst case error in the phase is 6% (14 • , at frequency 434 MHz, allowed phase range -180 • to +52.5 • ) and the worst case error in the power is 12.5% ( -1.25 W) at maximum allowed power which are not align with design criteria.Thus, restriction of the maximum power, avoiding long time system running are proposed to resolve the short time measurement errors and performing system calibration in one month interval is recommended.The GUI containing four tabs was developed in Labview.The four tabs are: Uploading Treatment Plan and Controlling the system, Visualizing of the temperature profile of different sensors and comparing real time treatment with the planned one, Documenting the treatment and the last one is for technical reference.The perfusion effects on biological tissue due to the blood perfusion were investigated in the last part of the project.It has been found that there are no changes in dielectric property of the biological tissue due to the perfusion.