Practical evaluations on heating characteristics of thin microwave antenna for intracavitary thermal therapy.

Microwave thermal therapy is one of the modalities for cancer treatment. There are several schemes of microwave heating. The authors have been studying thin coaxial antenna for intracavitary microwave heating aiming at the treatment of bile duct carcinoma. Up to now, the heating characteristics of the antenna are investigated by numerical simulation and experiment for finding a possibility of the treatment. In this study, in order to consider practical situations of the treatment, heating characteristics of the antenna inserted into a metallic stent is evaluated by numerical simulations. Moreover, the relation between coagulation size of the tissue and the radiation power from the antenna is investigated experimentally. It must be considered, when the input power of the antenna is high (around several tens of watts). From these investigations, some useful results for practical treatments were found.