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Microwave hyperthermia aims at selectively heating cancer cells to a supra-physiological temperature. For non-superficial tumors, this can be achieved by means of an antenna array equipped with a proper cooling system (the water bolus) to avoid overheating of the skin. In patient-specific treatment planning, antenna feedings are optimized to maximize the specific absorption rate (SAR) inside the tumor, or to directly maximize the temperature there, involving a higher numerical cost. We present here a method to effect a low-complexity temperature-based planning. It arises from recognizing that SAR and temperature have shifted peaks due to thermal boundary conditions at the water bolus and for physiological effects like air flow in respiratory ducts. In our method, temperature focusing on the tumor is achieved via a SAR-based optimization of the antenna excitations, but optimizing its target to account for the cooling effects. The temperature optimization process is turned into finding a SAR peak position that maximizes the chosen temperature objective function. Application of this method to the 3D head and neck region provides a temperature coverage that is consistently better than that obtained with SAR-optimization alone, also considering uncertainties in thermal parameters. This improvement is obtained by solving the bioheat equation a reduced number of times, avoiding its inclusion in a global optimization process., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure, accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology

Several recent contributions have envisioned the possibility of increasing currently exploitable maximum channel capacity of a free space link, both at optical and radio frequencies, by using vortex waves, i.e. carrying Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM). Our objective is to disprove these claims by showing that they are in contradiction with very fundamental properties of Maxwellian fields. We demonstrate that the Degrees of Freedom (DoF) of the field cannot be increased by the helical phase structure of electromagnetic vortex waves beyond what can be done without invoking this property. We also show that the often-advocated over-quadratic power decay of OAM beams with distance does not play any fundamental role in the determination of the channel DoF., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures

Electromagnetic computations, where the wavelength is small in relation to the geometry of interest, become computationally demanding. In order to manage computations for realistic problems like electromagnetic scattering from aircraft, the use of parallel computing is essential. In this paper, we describe how a solver based on a hierarchical nested equivalent source approximation can be implemented in parallel using a task based programming model. We show that the effort for moving from the serial implementation to a parallel implementation is modest due to the task based programming paradigm, and that the performance achieved on a multicore system is excellent provided that the task size, depending on the method parameters, is large enough.

A hierarchical quasi-Helmholtz decomposition, originally developed to address the low-frequency and dense-discretization breakdowns for the EFIE, is applied together with an algebraic preconditioner to improve the convergence of the CFIE in multiscale problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is studied first on some simple examples; next, test on real-life cases up to several hundreds wavelengths show its good performance.