Enhancement of Multifocal Breast Cancer Treatment using Multibeam Metasurface Antenna-based Hyperthermia

Abstract

Recent advances in cancer treatment using hyperthermia techniques have piqued researchers’ interest in examining and correcting treatment shortcomings. Focused microwave hyperthermia is a technique for treating breast tumors that has the advantages of great precision and few side effects. Breast hyperthermia is a noninvasive cancer treatment in which the temperature of the breast is slightly raised to 39- 45 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">°</sup> C by localized electromagnetic irradiation. Traditional hyperthermia techniques envisioned treating single or at most two spherical breast malignant foci with large-scale antenna arrays that required intricate feeding and phase management. This paper proposes a hyperthermia noninvasive multifocal breast cancer treatment using a single multi-beam meta-surface antenna. The proposed method raises the temperature of multifocal irregularly shaped breast cancers while keeping the surrounding healthy tissues at body temperature. Besides, the proposed meta-surface antenna is more efficient where its gain is three times the conventional ones at 2.3 GHz. Instead of employing an antenna array with a complex control unit for each antenna, the proposed antenna will have a single feed and workable control. Although the proposed single antenna element is miniaturized in its size to 65% at 2.4 GHz, the proposal keeps the same number of beams and radiation output. As a result, it will be easy to modify the radiated beams by the sites of the multifocal malignancy. To maintain the temperature of healthy tissues, a new reconfiguration technique for a 3D distribution of antenna beams is developed.