Microwave heating on outside of biliary stent by coaxial probe

Microwave thermal therapy is one of the modalities for cancer treatment. One example is microwave hyperthermia which is a thermal therapy for carcinoma based on the decrease of the survival ratio of cancer cells by heating. In particular, we have been studying the intracavitary heating using the implanted biliary stent and a thin coaxial microwave probe combined with endoscope which is an effective and low-invasive treatment for deep-seated carcinoma such as a bile duct carcinoma. This paper describes the heating characteristics around the biliary stent by conducting both the heating experiments using muscle-equivalent phantom and the numerical simulations using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method.