Optimization and optimal control of therapy parameters for radio-frequency-ablation

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Christof Büskens; Professor Dr. Tobias Preusser
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Mathematik
• Förderung: Förderung von 2006 bis 2011
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 25187974

For various tumor-diseases (liver-, lung-, bone-tumors, kidney-carcinoma), for which a surgical therapy is not possible due to the extent of the tumor or the general state of the patient, local and minimally invasive techniques have been established as alternative forms of the treatment. The so-called thermo-ablation treatments try to destroy the malignant tissue by local heating or cooling. Examples of local heating techniques are the radiofrequency- ablation (RF-ablation), laser induced thermo-therapy or focused ultrasound. ¿One goal of the project is the design of appropriate objective functionals which measure the quality of an ablation process. Furthermore the identification of the patient-individual material properties will be in the focus of the project. These include the electric and thermal conductivities as well as densities and heat capacities. The project aims at an optimization and optimal control of the RF-probe s positioning and electric potential. Since the mathematical model describing the ablation process is a system of PDEs which are coupled in a complex way, increasing levels of modeling, discretization and optimization will be considered. Finally the calculation of so-called sensitivity differentials of the optimal solutions with respect to model data and perturbations will be considered at the different levels. This information plays an important role in the analysis of partial results as aforementioned and might be a helpful tool in the assessment of optimal solutions for users.

• DFG-Verfahren: Schwerpunktprogramme
• Teilprojekt zu: SPP 1253: Optimierung mit partiellen Differentialgleichungen