US 11,839,449 B2
Real-time imaging system for monitoring and control of thermal therapy treatments
John P. Stang, South Pasadena, CA (US); Mark S. Haynes, Pasadena, CA (US); Mahta Moghaddam, Los Angeles, CA (US); and Guanbo Chen, Los Angeles, CA (US)
Assigned to University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (US)
Filed by University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (US)
Filed on Jul. 15, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/865,717.
Application 17/865,717 is a division of application No. 15/658,305, filed on Jul. 24, 2017, granted, now 11,426,080.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/365,927, filed on Jul. 22, 2016.
Prior Publication US 2022/0409062 A1, Dec. 29, 2022
Int. Cl. A61B 5/01 (2006.01); A61B 5/055 (2006.01); A61B 5/00 (2006.01); A61B 8/00 (2006.01)
CPC A61B 5/015 (2013.01) [A61B 5/0036 (2018.08); A61B 5/055 (2013.01); A61B 5/4836 (2013.01); A61B 8/463 (2013.01)] 6 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method of monitoring in real-time a thermal therapy, the method comprising:
positioning an imaging system around a treatment region;
imaging the treatment region to obtain dielectric properties;
collecting a plurality of pairwise measurements from the treatment region to determine a plurality of S-parameters of the dielectric properties;
generating a numerical function directly linking a material property of the treatment region to the plurality of S-parameters, wherein the material property is indicative of a permittivity of the treatment region;
determining a solution of the numerical function for the material property of the treatment region using local optimization;
mapping the dielectric properties to the treatment region to generate a map of complex permittivity of the treatment region using the solution of the numerical function for the material property;
calculating an electric field inside the treatment region and a plurality of calculated S-parameters based on the map of the complex permittivity using a conformal finite-difference time domain (CFDTD) forward solver;
generating an updated numerical function based at least in part on the measured electric field:
outputting the map of complex permittivity for the treatment region based on the updated numerical function;
conducting the thermal therapy on the treatment region based on the map of complex permittivity;
generating a thermal image of the treatment region in real-time based on the dielectric properties of the treatment region; and
controlling the thermal therapy on the treatment region in response to the thermal image.