It is highly important to completely destroy the tumour in RFA because surviving cells may develop resistance towards heat and promote more aggressive tumour growth. In order to provide more assurance for doctors, the “Medical Therapy Planning” (MTP) group and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing MEVIS develop an imaging-based planning system for patient-individual planning of RFA therapy.

The software:

• allows to consider important clinical aspects of the therapy (such as
  the complete ablation of the tumour or the heat distribution in
  neighbouring organs) systematically,
• calculates optimal applicator positions considering critical
  anatomical structures which obstruct access to the tumour (e.g. the ribs),
• allows the classical forward planning of the therapy where the
  applicator can be positioned freely and the quality of the resulting
  therapy is automatically measured according to various clinical aspects
  and displayed,
• allows inverse therapy planning where clinical aims can be formulated
  and adjusted iteratively in an intuitive way and the system calculates
  the applicator position to best reach the so specified goals.