Verification of hyperthermia treatment planning in cervix carcinoma patients using invasive thermometry

Full text: Hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) is a useful tool for improvement of clinical hyperthermia treatments. Aim of this study was to determine the correlation between HTP and measurements during hyperthermia treatments. We compared the calculated specific absorption rate (SAR) with clinically measured SAR-values, from ΔT-measurements, in cervix carcinoma patients. General difficulties for such clinical verifications are changes in the anatomy during the different steps and possible movement of the catheters. We used one fixed invasive catheter in the tumor additional to the usual non-invasive catheters in the vagina, bladder and rectum, for insertion of multisensor thermocouple probes. A special CT-scan with the patient in treatment position and the catheters in situ was made for the HTP. We performed these verifications in a total of 11 treatments in 7 patients. The main difficulties for accurate verification were of clinical nature: difficulties arising from the use of gynaecological tampon and the limited number of measurements in tissue. Remaining air in the vagina and sub-optimal tissue contact of the catheters resulted in bad thermal contact between thermocouples and tissue, causing measurement artefacts that are difficult to correlate with calculations. These artefacts are probably not specific for thermocouple measurements, but more general for intraluminal temperature and SAR measurements. (author)