Modeling Electrical and Thermal Conductivities of Biological Tissue in Radiofrequency Ablation

M. Trujillo[1], E. Berjano[1]
[1]Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain
Published in 2013

Radiofrequency ablation is a minimally invasive techinique which is used to treat some kinds of cancer. The realism of theoretical models is very important. An influential factor in this realism is mathematical functions that model the temperature-dependence of tissue thermal and electrical conductivities. The aim of this work is to review the mathematical functions employed to model the temperature dependence of this parameters in previous computer modeling studies and to assess how these different functions affect lesion dimension evolution during theoretical computations of radiofrequency hepatic ablation. To achieve our objective we use a model of RF hepatic ablation. Results are very similar in all the cases and show that differences considered in terms of lesion size are smaller than 3.5%.