Research Project
6788342
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Clinical applications of hyperthermia therapy have demonstrated great promise in the treatment of certain skin and superficial tissue diseases including cancer and plaque psoriasis. In all cases, temperatures must be maintained between about 40 - 45'C for one hour or more in order to achieve maximally effective dosing with minimal patient discomfort. Though well-established relationships of thermal dosage required treating various disease (tumor) types have been developed, the accurate measurement of the thermal dosage remains elusive. The goal of this research is to design and fabricate a thermal monitoring system for high-resolution dosimetry characterization of surface temperature distributions over large areas of contoured anatomy. The primary objective of the proposal is to examine the feasibility of making a thin and flexible, potentially disposable, sheet that contains a large number (48 initially) of fiber optic sensors arranged in a regular two dimensional grid. The envisioned 2-1) temperature profiling system is composed of optical temperature sensor arrays fabricated in a sheet in conjunction with optoelectronic instrumentation and a pseudo color display panel. The temperature sensing elements, immobilized at the tips of optical fibers, are phosphor materials that exhibit fluorescent lifetime changes in response to temperature variation, thus providing a RF-immune, self-referencing measurement technique. Because the fiberoptic probes minimally perturb the field and do not suffer from field induced artifacts, surface monitoring using fiber optic probes can be expected to be a highly accurate method for dosimetry. In addition, the system proposed here does not require support resources such as liquid nitrogen cooling and does not involve bulky camera optics. The thermal monitoring sheet can be easily integrated with the microwave applicator, and will give accurate spatial temperature readings even when ambient conditions change (e.g. room lights go on or off, humidity, etc.) Because the conformal measurement array moves with the patient, it also does not require that the patient sit motionless during the procedure, which may last hours.
