FAST and ACCURATE SIMULATIONS for PHOTOTHERMAL CANCER TREATMENT
Despite advances modern management and care, intracranial metastases and recurrence of cancerous tumors continue to be a source of significant morbidity in adults and children. University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center (UT MDACC) has demonstrated the exciting possibility of using the plasmonic properties of nanoparticles taken up in an animal model of metastases in human organs to provide a conformal mode of therapy delivery under MR-guidance. In order to fully investigate the potential of this mode of therapy, they are also developing in silico models.
Within this research we hypothesize that fast, accurate and effective mesh-free models for simulating the plasmon mediated heating of the human organs can be developed, validated, and used for investigating the capabilities of this novel approach to therapy. In future the computer simulation of therapy and potentially planning treatments can be made available for arbitrary tumor geometry, describing spatial and temporal heating from plasmonic particles. We strongly feel this problem can be most effectively approached by the marriage of the proposed advanced methods for simulating radiative transport and bioheat transport at Rice with MR-temperature imaging with the use of in silico models at UT MDACC for validation of predictions.
Co-PIs: Andrew Meade, Jason Staffford and Aysegul Sahin
Rice Collaborative Advances in Biomedical Computing (CABC)
Presentations:
Y. Bayazitoglu, “Nanoshell Assisted Cancer Thermal Theraphy: Numerical Simulations”, Proceedings of the 2nd ASME Micro/Nanoscale Heat & Mass Transfer: An International Conference, Shanghai, Paper No MNHMT- 18546, 18-21 December 2009 and Keynote presentation.
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R.J. Stafford gave an invited seminar “MR-guided Thermal Therapy at MDACC” at Rice, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department on 20th of January, 2010.
Published Papers:
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X.Xu, A. Meade, Y. Bayazitoglu, “Fluence rate distribution in laser-induced interstitial thermotherapy by meshfree collacation”, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 53:4017-4022, 2010.
X. Xu, A.Meade, Y. Bayazitoglu, “Numerical investigation of nanoparticle-assited laser-induced interstitial thermotheraphy toward tumor and cancer treatments”, Lasers in Medical Science, DOI: 10.1007/s10103-010-0828-3, published online: September 4, 2010.
This work made possible in part through support from the John & Ann Doerr Fund for
Computational Biomedicine