Focused Microwave Intracranial Heating: towards mitigation of late side effects of childhood brain cancer treatment

Research Project, 2022 – 2025

The long-term goal of my research is to implement a hyperthermia system for brain tumor treatment in clinical practice. Although modern therapy cures 75% of all children struck with cancer, the tough therapy has both acute and long-lasting, severe side-effects.
Even low doses of ionizing radiation to the brain can cause intellectual impairment and perturbed growth and puberty. If the severe long-term-effects of the therapy could be reduced, the overall quality of life would be greatly improved.The basic hypothesis, which motivates the work, is that an increased temperature in tumors in conjunction with radiation therapy will allow for a reduction of a radiation dose while maintaining the treatment outcome without increased toxicity. Our recent numerical results indicates that our UWB technology along with novel treatment planning strategies, is capable of achieving adequate tumor temperatures, without inducing unacceptable hot spots. In this project, we aim to verify the promising numerical results experimentally by developing a complete system using multiple frequencies during a single treatment session. The performance will be verified on anthropomorphic phantoms. Further, the novel radiobiological modeling tool, predicting the synergistic effect of heat and radiation in terms of clinically relevant parameters will allow us to identify suitable patient candidates for combined treatments. An animal trial will be performed to assess the safety of the intracranial heating.