Nanomagnetic hyperthermia (NMH) is intensively studied with the prospect of cancer therapy. A major challenge is to determine the dissipated power during in vivo conditions and conventional methods are either invasive or inaccurate. We present a non-calorimetric method which yields the heat absorbed during hyperthermia: it is based on accurately measuring the quality factor change of a resonant radio frequency circuit which is employed for the irradiation. The approach provides the absorbed power in real-time, without the need to monitor the sample temperature as a function of time. As such, it is free from the problems caused by the non-adiabatic heating conditions of the usual calorimetry. We validate the method by comparing the dissipated power with a conventional calorimetric measurement. We present the validation for two types of resonators with very different filling factors: a solenoid and a so-called birdcage coil. The latter is a volume coil, which is generally used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) under in vivo condition. The presented method therefore allows to effectively combine MRI and thermotherapy and is thus readily adaptable to existing imaging hardware.
Absorbed power of nanoparticles during magnetic hyperthermia can be well determined from changes in the quality factor (Q factor) of a resonator, in which the radiofrequency (RF) absorbent is placed. We present an order of magnitude improvement in the Q factor measurement accuracy over conventional methods by studying the switch-on and off transient signals of the resonators. A nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) console is ideally suited to acquire the transient signals and it also allows to employ the so-called pulse phase-cycling to remove transient artifacts. The improved determination of the absorbed power is demonstrated on various resonators in the 1-30 MHz range including standard solenoids and also a birdcage resonator. This leads to the possibility to detect minute amounts of ferrite nanoparticles which are embedded in the body and also the amount of the absorbed power. We demonstrate this capability on a phantom study, where the exact location of an embedded ferrite is clearly detected.PACS numbers:
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