Comprehensive preclinical evaluation of a multi-physics model of liver tumor radiofrequency ablation.

Purpose: We aim at developing a framework for the validation of a subject-specific multi-physics model of liver tumor radiofrequency ablation (RFA).

Methods: The RFA computation becomes subject specific after several levels of personalization: geometrical and biophysical (hemodynamics, heat transfer and an extended cellular necrosis model). We present a comprehensive experimental setup combining multimodal, pre- and postoperative anatomical and functional images, as well as the interventional monitoring of intra-operative signals: the temperature and delivered power.

Results: To exploit this dataset, an efficient processing pipeline is introduced, which copes with image noise, variable resolution and anisotropy. The validation study includes twelve ablations from five healthy pig livers: a mean point-to-mesh error between predicted and actual ablation extent of 5.3 ± 3.6 mm is achieved.

Conclusion: This enables an end-to-end preclinical validation framework that considers the available dataset.