Towards personalized and versatile monitoring of temperature fields within heterogeneous tissues during laser therapies

Abstract

Advancements in medical laser technology have paved the way for its widespread acceptance in a variety of treatments and procedures. Selectively targeting particular tissue structures with minimally invasive procedures limits the damage to surrounding tissue and allows for reduced post-procedural downtime. In many treatments that are hyperthermia-based, the efficiency depends on the achieved temperature within the targeted tissues. Current approaches for monitoring subdermal temperature distributions are either invasive, complex, or offer inadequate spatial resolution. Numerical studies are often therapy-tailored and source tissue parameters from the literature, lacking versatility and a tissue-specific approach. Here, we show a protocol that estimates the temperature distribution within the tissue based on a thermographic recording of its surface temperature evolution. It couples a time-dependent matching algorithm and thermal-diffusion-based model, while recognizing tissue-specific characteristics yielded by a fast calibration process. The protocol was employed during hyperthermic laser treatment performed ex-vivo on a heterogeneous porcine tissue, and in-vivo on a human subject. In both cases the calibrated thermal parameters correlate with the range of values reported by other studies. The matching algorithm sufficiently reproduced the temperature dynamics of heterogeneous tissue. The estimated temperature distributions within ex-vivo tissue were validated by simultaneous reference measurements, and the ones estimated in-vivo reveal a distribution trend that correlates well with similar studies. The presented method is versatile, supported by the protocol for tissue-specific tailoring, and can readily be implemented for temperature monitoring of various hyperthermia-based procedures by means of recording the surface temperature evolution with a miniature thermal camera implemented within a handheld laser scanner or similar.

Selective and Controllable Mechanism of the Temperature Field in Pig Skin under Radiofrequency Heating

“…Notably, Kosir et al successfully analyzed the temperature distribution of ex-vivo porcine fat tissue under laser therapies through numerical calculations and experiments. [28][29][30] This motivates us to study the controllable and selective mechanism for the temperature field of pig skin under RF heating using the same method.…”

Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of the Effect of Vaporization Heat on the Interaction between Laser and Biological Tissue

“…Additionally, there is ongoing research focusing on the impact of interstitial space within tissue, which represents a current direction in bioheat transfer studies [15][16][17]. Furthermore, some models have incorporated changes in structural mechanics, offering new simulation approaches to account for additional mechanical alterations during the process of bioheat transfer [7,18].…”