Computer simulation of RF liver ablation on an MRI scan data

Abstract

Radio-frequency (RF) ablation is a low invasive technique for treatment of liver tumors. An RF-probe is inserted in the patient's liver and a ground pad is applied to the skin. Then the tumor is heated with RF current. The heat causes the destruction of tumor cells. We use the finite element method (FEM) to simulate and analyze various aspects of the procedure. A 3D image of the patient's liver is obtained from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Then, the geometry for the RFprobe and the ground pad is added. Our focus is on the influence of the position of the ground pads on the ablation process. Our simulation is based on an unstructured mesh. The size of the mesh is large due to the complexity of the domain. We discretize and solve the problem on a parallel computer using MPI for the parallelization. The presented numerical tests are performed on IBM Blue Gene/P machine at BGSC. The parallel efficiency of the incorporated BoomerAMG solver is demonstrated as well.