Generation of Controllable Heating Patterns for Interstitial Microwave Hyperthermia by Coaxial-Dipole Antennas

Hyperthermia is one of the modalities for cancer treatment, utilizing the difference of thermal sensitivity between tumor and normal tissue. Interstitial microwave hyperthermia is one of the heating schemes and it is applied to a localized tumor. In the treatments, heating pattern control around antennas are important, especially for the treatment in and around critical organs. This paper introduces a coaxial-dipole antenna, which is one of the thin microwave antennas and can generate a controllable heating pattern. Moreover, generations of an arbitrary shape heating patterns by an array applicator composed of four coaxial-dipole antennas are described. key words: hyperthermia, microwave heating, internal heating, controllable heating pattern, array applicator