Cycled Pulsing for Prostate Tumor to Mitigate Thermal Damage, While Conserving the Ablation Area

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancer-related diseases among men. Traditional treatment options cannot always treat the disease successfully as limitations and complications exist since the traditional treatments lack specificity and have an invasive nature. Focal therapy is a prominent option to address the existing problem, since it is minimally invasive and target specific region of the tumor. Most focal therapy techniques are thermally mediated, which can cause damage to the surrounding tissue, vasculatures, and nerves. Irreversible electroporation is a minimally thermal technique which delivers electric pulses to create transient nanopores in cell membrane, ultimately leading to cell death. IRE is predominantly non-thermal technique, but the thermal side effect of Joule heating exists during treatment. Cycled pulsing of IRE is a technique to mitigate thermal damage through partitioning of pulses and adding interpulse delays. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the effects of segmenting the pulses and adding delays to regular IRE pulse schemes on the temperature fluctuation and therapeutic efficacy. The partitioning of pulses and interpulse delays decreased the temperature rise during the IRE treatment, while the ablation areas of the experimental groups were maintained in close range to the control group. The lethal electric field threshold did not increase with the variables. Therefore, segmenting the pulses and adding the delays were effective at dissipating thermal damage, while maintaining the therapeutic efficacy.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Department dc:contributor.department

Biomedical Engineering (Joint GT/Emory Department)

Grantor dc:publisher

Georgia Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Shin, Hee Chang

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Davalos, Rafael V.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Prausnitz, Mark
• Sarkar, Aniruddh

• IRE
• Cycled Pulsing
• Delay

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1853/81513

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.gatech.edu:1853/81513