DESIGN UNDER UNCERTAINTIES OF THE THERMAL ABLATION OF TUMORS WITH HIGH INTENSITY FOCUSED ULTRASOUND

In clinical applications, thermal ablation consists of the removal or destruction of a specific tissue by heat. High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive technique that can be used for the thermal ablation of tumors with minimum side-effects. This work dealt with the design of thermal ablation of a tumor heated by HIFU. A two dimensional region with a hypothetical rectangular tumor was considered here. The acoustic problem was simulated with the numerical solution of the mass and momentum conservation equations. The heating process was optimally designed under uncertainties in the model parameters by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, implemented via the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Two design variables were considered in this preliminary work, namely: the heating time and the vertical location of the HIFU transducer. The obtained results revealed that the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm could deal with all associated uncertainties and provided a robust design for the problem under analysis.