Medical Image Guided Thermal Ablation: Mathematical Modeling and Image Registration

This book is timely because of the increasing popularity of minimally invasive and cost effective methods to ablate solid tumors. Medical image guided ablation using thermal energy sources such as radio-frequency, microwave, laser, high-intensity focused ultrasound, and cyrogenics have received much recent attention as minimally invasive strategies for the ablation of tumors. This text describes novel and practical image registration methods and mathematical models to predict the cellular response from magnetic resonance (MR) images, which guide and monitor therapy. Many clinical and animal model studies seeking to characterize the biological response to thermal ablations, localized drug release, and other MRI-guided therapies would benefit from this book. This text should be especially useful for medical, engineering, applied mathematics, physics, and computer science students, researchers, and clinicians.

Michael S. Breen received his PhD in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He has worked as a senior engineer in the Computed Tomography Research Division at Picker International (currently Phillips Medical Systems). He is presently a Research Physical Scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.