Gerald M Saidel

US Patent:

20060184163, Aug 17, 2006

Filed:

Feb 16, 2005

Appl. No.:

11/058882

Inventors:

Michael Breen - Streetsboro OH, US
David Wilson - Mayfield Heights OH, US
Gerald Saidel - Cleveland OH, US

International Classification:

A61B 18/18
A61B 18/04

US Classification:

606020000, 606002000, 606027000, 606033000, 606041000

Abstract:

A system and methods for modeling the death of tissue cells that are thermally treated using thermal treatment devices is disclosed. A cell-death model accurately predicts, in real-time, which voxels of cells are dead or are about to die as the thermal treatment is applied to these cells. The effects of thermal treatment are monitored by a thermal measurement device which feeds thermal information to the cell-death model. The cell-death model accounts for the temperature of each voxel of tissue cells with respect to a temperature threshold value and the duration over which the thermal treatment is applied. When the thermal measurement device is an imaging device, the results of the thermal treatment may be displayed to the user in real-time. As a result, a user of the thermal treatment device can determine, in real-time, which target voxels of cells he has killed and which still need to be killed. The user can also more easily avoid inadvertently killing healthy tissue that he does not intend to kill. The cell-death model may be implemented in software on the thermal measurement device, on the thermal treatment device, or on a separate processing device which interfaces to and communicates with at least one of the thermal measurement device and the thermal treatment device.