Multi-Target FOCO for Head&Neck Hyperthermia Treatment Planning: A Feasibility Study

Clinical studies have shown the benefit of hyperthermia as a strong adjuvant to conventional cancer treatments but a tight control of the administered heating still represents an open challenge. Planning the hyperthermia treatment is the way to deliver a target conformal specific absorption rate (SAR) deposition over the target area while keeping the SAR bounded in normal tissue. This task is even more challenging in case of large and irregularly shaped target volumes. Motivated by this need, the so-called multi-target focusing via constrained power optimization was developed. In the current study, we investigated the effective gain in terms of heating profile of the proposed approach using simulations of 3D clinical patient specific models. Results indicate an average median temperature gain of 0.8°C with respect to standard FOCO.