Feedback Dose Control in Thermal Therapy
The American Cancer Society predicted that 1.372 million Americans would be diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and 570,280 would die of it. Improved treatment is imperative for reducing this staggering death rate. Hyperthermia is a promising noninvasive cancer treatment modality that involves the use of elevated temperatures. It can be used for tissue ablation alone or used in conjunction with radiation and chemotherapies. Studies have shown a significant reduction in tumor size when hyperthermia is combined with other treatments. The lack of adequate control of noninvasive delivery of heat has been identified as an obstacle to widespread use of thermal therapies. This technology addresses this problem and describes a model predictive controller which is designed to achieve treatment efficacy by aiding in the delivery of the desired thermal dose to the tumor without violating safety constraints. Advantages of this model predictive control include real-time imposition of constraints on temperatures in the normal tissues and real-time optimization of the amount of power delivered to heat the tumor.Benefits
There exists a $4 billion cancer therapeutics market that mainly focuses on chemotherapy and radiation. There remains a large potential market for effective hyperthermia technology. One company involved in hyperthermia treatment project the market for their products to be $300 million. This technology has the potential to aid most machines used in hyperthermia treatments.
Stage of Development
A formal patentability opinion is being considered at this time.
This technology is part of an active and ongoing research program and has been demonstrated to work in proof-of-concept experiments which includes a working prototype and has been validated in animal experiments. They are seeking partners for development of the working product. It is available for developmental research support and or licensing under either exclusive or non-exclusive terms.
Additional Info
*Arora D, Cooley D, Perry T, Skliar M, Roemer RB (2005) Direct thermal dose control of constrained focused ultrasound treatments: phantom and in vivo evaluation. Phys Med Biol. 50(8):1919-35.
*Arora D, Skliar M, Roemer RB. (2005) Minimum-time thermal dose control of thermal therapies. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 52(2):191-200.
*http://implicit.che.utah.edu/
Inventor(s): Mikhail Skliar, Dhiraj Arora, Robert Roemer
Type of Offer: Licensing
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