An automated ablation planning method for liver tumors

Thermal ablation is a minimally invasive treatment method widely used in liver tumors. The traditional thermal ablation planning needs the doctor to complete manually. When the liver tumor needs to be ablated multiple times, the doctor’s experience and ability are highly required. In this paper, a new automatic liver tumor ablation planning method is proposed, which can automatically determine the ablation parameters that completely cover the liver tumor and cause relatively little damage to the surrounding normal tissue, assisting for doctors to give a reasonable and feasible plan in less time. The method is mainly divided into two steps. In the first step, a Genetic Algorithm is introduced to determining tumor ablation trajectories. In the second step, the total number of ablation targets are determined according to the optimization function. Our proposed method was evaluated using liver tumors of different sizes. The results show that the method is able to generate feasible ablation plans.