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Multiple objective planning for thermal ablation of liver tumors

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Preoperative treatment planning is key to ensure successful thermal ablation of liver tumors. The planning aims to minimize the number of electrodes required for complete ablation and the damage to the surrounding tissues while satisfying multiple clinical constraints. This is a challenging multiple objective planning problem, in which the trade-off between different objectives must be considered.

Methods

We propose a novel method to solve the multiple objective planning problem, which combines the set cover-based model and Pareto optimization. The set cover-based model considers multiple clinical constraints and generates several clinically feasible treatment plans, among which the Pareto optimization is performed to find the trade-off between different objectives.

Results

We evaluated the proposed method on 20 tumors of 11 patients in two different situations used in common thermal ablation approaches: with and without the pull-back technique. Pareto optimal plans were found and verified to be clinically acceptable in all cases, which can find the trade-off between the number of electrodes and the damage to the surrounding tissues.

Conclusion

The proposed method performs well in the two different situations we considered: with or without the pull-back technique. It can generate Pareto optimal plans satisfying multiple clinical constraints. These plans consider the trade-off between different planning objectives.

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Funding

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC0119503, 2017YFA0205904) and Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (20197010009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Room C249, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

    Libin Liang, Guangzhi Wang & Hui Ding

  2. Robarts Research Institute, Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Libin Liang & Aaron Fenster

  3. Department of Medical Imaging, Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Derek Cool & Aaron Fenster

  4. Department of Radiology, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Manchester, UK

    Nirmal Kakani

Authors
  1. Libin Liang
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  2. Derek Cool
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  3. Nirmal Kakani
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  4. Guangzhi Wang
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  5. Hui Ding
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  6. Aaron Fenster
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guangzhi Wang.

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This paper is based on the work: “Liang L., Cool D., Kakani N., Wang G., Ding H., Fenster A. (2019) Development of a Multi-objective Optimized Planning Method for Microwave Liver Tumor Ablation. In: Shen D. et al. (eds) Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2019. MICCAI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11768. Springer, Cham.”

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Liang, L., Cool, D., Kakani, N. et al. Multiple objective planning for thermal ablation of liver tumors. Int J CARS 15, 1775–1786 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-020-02252-6

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