On the cooling effect of flowing blood on hepatic tumor ablation process

Abstract

One method of removing malignant tissues from human organs is radiofrequency ablation. Thermal radiofrequency is a common technique of liver tumour therapy, which depends mainly on heating the infected region. This work proposes to investigate the thermal issue, which – in instance of excessive current – leads to extra lesion in liver tissues. However, the thermal lesions and the mistakes occurred in positioning the trocar instrument in the correct and accurate place arise the need to simulate and prediction of the thermal and electrical behaviour of the ablation operation. By using COMSOL multiphysics package, the process of hepatic tumour ablation has been simulated. Results show that by virtue of higher blood electrical conductivity, the nearby liver tissue around the electrode can be heated by rising its temperature due to electrical current from the radiofrequency probe according to the Joule law. Also, in this paper, different values of blood perfusion rate have been applied in the simulation process to investigate its effect on the ablation process. It is found that the increasing of mass flow rate of blood flow tends to bring down the fraction of necrotic tissue, which is contraindicated to the tumour ablation process.

Keywords:

• Simulation
• cooling effect
• hepatic tumour
• radiofrequency
• ablation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.