Thermal ablation techniques for tumor treatment: open measurement issues from research to industry

Mini-invasive techniques in medicine are the novel paradigm to achieve good treatment results while keeping the patient at ease and avoid heavy and painful application of standard techniques. This is the case of tumor treatment, with special reference to organs such as liver, lung, kidney. In this case, the application of a well-localized heat source can destroy tumor cells by means of a necrotic process. Such techniques are based on different technologies: Radio Frequency and Microwave are the most common ones. Nevertheless, several open issues are still present as the optimal choice of application time, the definition of the burning area, the best stimulus signal to be applied, the modeling of the target area concerning its electric/magnetic properties whose values can evolve during treatment. For all these reasons, and not limited to, the role of engineers is crucial to obtain better performance with limited amount of energy and limited side effects for the patient. Particularly, the measurement open issues and how such issues could lead to an enhancement of the industrial production processes of needed apparatuses are reported in this paper.