PRELIMINARY HEAT TRANSFER SIMULATION MODEL OF A NOVEL DYNAMIC THERMAL ABLATION PROBE

Recent advancements in medical technology have included engineering thermal ablation probes, a minimally invasive cancer treatment aimed to heat up cancerous cells. Currently, probes meant to treat hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC), commonly known as liver cancer, are limited to tumors up to 5 cm across. Consequently, the effectiveness of ablation treatment decreases considerably for tumors beyond this range. Unlike most probes that are stationary, a novel design by Han et al. intends to extend beyond this range via a dynamic probe. We present a mathematical heat transfer model in which the spatial- and time dependent heat source probe is represented by an ad hoc combination of traveling wave solutions. Specifically, 1D and 2D simulated results for the heat transfer of the dynamic probe are presented in this paper for selected input parameters. This preliminary mathematical model paves the way for optimizing the dynamic thermal ablation probe in future work.