A numerical study on thermal ablation of brain tumor with intraoperative focused ultrasound

Focused ultrasound surgery (FUS) is a non-invasive thermal therapeutic method which has been emerged in the field of brain tumors treatment. During intraoperative brain surgery, application of FUS can significantly increase the accuracy of thermal ablation of tumor while reducing undesirable damage to healthy brain tissue. The main objective of this study is acquiring acoustic transducer specifications to achieve optimum thermal treatment in the tumoral tissue. 2D and 3D models are constructed from patient-specific brain MRI images which consist of a malignant vascular tumor. Acoustic pressure and temperature are obtained by using homogenous Helmholtz and bio-heat transfer equations according to insignificant nonlinear effect. Besides that, thermal lesion induced by FUS is obtained by the thermal dose function. Results show the significance of blood vessels' cooling effect on the temperature profile. Moreover, correlation between temperature profile and transducer's operating parameter including power, frequency and duty cycle is obtained. Artificial neural network analysis is conducted to estimate required transducer parameters for optimum temperature rise.