Control of thermal therapies with moving power deposition field

Abstract

A thermal therapy feedback control approach to control thermal dose using a moving power deposition field is developed and evaluated using simulations. A normal tissue safety objective is incorporated in the controller design by imposing constraints on temperature elevations at selected normal tissue locations. The proposed control technique consists of two stages. The first stage uses a model-based sliding mode controller that dynamically generates an ‘ideal’ power deposition profile which is generally unrealizable with available heating modalities. Subsequently, in order to approximately realize this spatially distributed idealized power deposition, a constrained quadratic optimizer is implemented to compute intensities and dwell times for a set of pre-selected power deposition fields created by a scanned focused transducer. The dwell times for various power deposition profiles are dynamically generated online as opposed to the commonly employed a priori-decided heating strategies. Dynamic intensity and trajectory generation safeguards the treatment outcome against modelling uncertainties and unknown disturbances. The controller is designed to enforce simultaneous activation of multiple normal tissue temperature constraints by rapidly switching between various power deposition profiles. The hypothesis behind the controller design is that the simultaneous activation of multiple constraints substantially reduces treatment time without compromising normal tissue safety. The controller performance and robustness with respect to parameter uncertainties is evaluated using simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller can successfully deliver the desired thermal dose to the target while maintaining the temperatures at the user-specified normal tissue locations at or below the maximum allowable values. Although demonstrated for the case of a scanned focused ultrasound transducer, the developed approach can be extended to other heating modalities with moving deposition fields, such as external and interstitial ultrasound phased arrays, multiple radiofrequency needle applicators and microwave antennae.