Feasibility study of modeling liver thermal damage using minimally invasive optical method adequate for in situ measurement.

Liver thermal ablation techniques have been widely used for the treatment of liver cancer. Kinetic model of damage propagation play an important role for ablation prediction and real-time efficacy assessment. However, practical methods for modeling liver thermal damage are rare. A minimally invasive optical method especially adequate for in situ liver thermal damage modeling is introduced in this paper. Porcine liver tissue was heated by water bath under different temperatures. During thermal treatment, diffuse reflectance spectrum of liver was measured by optical fiber and used to deduce reduced scattering coefficient (μ's ). Arrhenius parameters were obtained through non-isothermal heating approach with damage marker of μ's . Activation energy (Ea ) and frequency factor (A) was deduced from these experiments. A pair of averaged value is 1.200 × 105  J mol-1 and 4.016 × 1017  s-1 . The results were verified for their reasonableness and practicality. Therefore, it is feasible to modeling liver thermal damage based on minimally invasive measurement of optical property and in situ kinetic analysis of damage progress with Arrhenius model. These parameters and this method are beneficial for preoperative planning and real-time efficacy assessment of liver ablation therapy.