A practical pretreatment planning method of multiple puncturing for thermal ablation surgery

Abstract

Thermal ablation surgery serves as one of the main approaches to treat liver tumors. The pretreatment planning, which highly demands the experience and ability of the physician, plays a vital role in thermal ablation surgery. The planning of multiple puncturing is necessary for avoiding the possible interference, destroying the tumor thoroughly and minimizing the damage to healthy tissue. A GPU-independent pretreatment planning method is proposed based on multi-objective optimization, which takes the most comprehensive constraints into consideration. An adaptive decision method of closing kernel size based on Jenks Natural Breaks is utilized to describe the final feasible region more accurately. It should be noted that the reasonable procedure of solving the feasible region and the use of KD tree based high dimensional search approach are used to enhance the computational efficiency. Seven constraints are handled within 7 s without GPU acceleration. The Pareto front points of nine puncturing tests are obtained in 5 s by using the NSGA-II algorithm. To evaluate the maximum difference and similarity between the planning results and the puncturing points recommended by the physician, Hausdorff distance and overlap rate are respectively developed, the Hausdorff distances are within 30 mm in seven out of nine tests and the average value of overlap rate is 73.0% for all the tests. The puncturing paths of high safety and clinical-practice compliance can be provided by the proposed method, based on which the pretreatment planning software developed can apply to the interns’ training and ability evaluating for thermal ablation surgery.